Emerging storage vendors offer data centre managers and storage administrators fresh answers for their storage challenges. Rubrik offers a scale-out appliance integrated with backup software, a fast recovery storage tier and an onramp to a long-term retention storage tier (local or in the cloud), as well as a global search tool for restore and recovery.

Why should you Select Rubrik for a simplified VMware backup infrastructure?

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders often share common goals and challenges, including a need to modernise their storage infrastructures, improve agility and quality of service, and address the requirement to contain costs, while simultaneously delivering new applications and maintaining legacy systems. New storage software and system providers can help stakeholders build easier-to-manage, more scalable and efficient storage infrastructures. Many organisations are evaluating technologies that will drive efficiency, such as higher-performing and more automated storage, cloud-based solutions, and data management and backup and recovery products that allow for proactive problem avoidance and increased resource utilisation and optimisation.

I-BIT are sharing Gartner’s findings regarding private storage vendors that can assist organisations in meeting their infrastructure agility, data centre modernization and cost containment initiatives.

www.rubrik.com – Cool Vendor 2016 awarded from Gartner

In mid-2015, Rubrik launched an innovative, all-in-one, scale-out integrated backup appliance. It is cool because it can simplify enterprises’ complex backup infrastructures by implementing agentless, policy-based backup management and backup storage tiering leveraging external low-cost storage, such as cloud, for long-term retention.

Although integrated (or, as Rubrik says, “converged”) backup appliances are not new, early entrants typically don’t have a scale-out server/storage hardware infrastructure, and many of them use their own traditional backup software that can still be complex to manage. On the backup software side, Rubrik applies in-line deduplication on the initial full backup and uses the incremental forever method afterwards, with virtual synthetic full and continuous garbage collection in the background. Because it stores virtual copies of data in the native format, it allows instant read/write access for fast recovery. In addition, on the appliance, Rubrik maintains a global backup metadata index and search capability across the performance tier and the archive tier, which enables faster single-file discovery and recovery. Rubrik changes the traditional job-based management to SLA policy-based management, which simplifies the process of local backup and replication and file-archiving, and can reduce the worker-hours needed to manage the backup infrastructure.

On the hardware side, the scale-out architecture with a distributed file system metadata service allows automatic expansion of compute and storage resources, with automatic failover and load balancing. Such a hardware architecture eliminates the difficult task of accurately forecasting the backup environment in three to five years and avoids the common problem of under sizing the backup growth rate when purchasing new devices. The appliance functions as the performance tier for faster recovery, and it archives the old backups to a lower-cost tier of storage, which could be public cloud, object stores or NFS file storage.

Why should you care?

Although Rubrik has deployments in large enterprises, it may be most relevant today for midsize organisations that run Windows and Linux applications on VMware and are looking for simple backup tools to reduce backup infrastructure complexity. Organisations with mixed physical and virtual environments may also find Rubrik attractive if they are willing to use a different backup tool for other hypervisors or physical environments — until Rubrik delivers support for these other platforms.