Rubrik

Rubrik (Swedish for New Standard) is a web scale, appliance-based, data backup and recovery platform started by Bipul Sinha and Arvind “Nitro” Nithrakashyap. This appliance is called a Brik. It consists of 4 dual processor compute nodes (commodity) in a 2U chassis. Each node can provide up to 30k IOPS and 1.2 GBps of throughput. Each node consists of 1 SSD and 3 HDDs. The most dense config currently provides 30TB of raw capacity. Compression (Inline), Dedupe (Inline and Global), and encryption are supported and they average about 75-80% data efficiency in the field. Extraction of snapshotted data is nearly instantaneous thanks to some proprietary algorithms developed around flash architecture parallelism.

Backup software that handles catalogs and data movement runs natively on the platform saving organizations money on 3rd party backup software such as Commvault or Veeam.  No additional servers to run that software are required either. No additional storage device. Generally, you buy some software, some servers to run it on, and some storage to send the data to. This is all that in one…and then some.

Another big difference with this solution is the elimination of the RTO generally associated with restoring from backup or even the time spent making your remote replica writable. This appliance basically makes your backup device act as a primary storage device until you can get your primary storage back online and ready for a migration of the data back on to that primary storage. Are we allowed to say Hyper-converged?

Leveraging policies (instead of traditional jobs) along with a resource scheduler and algorithms developed in house that optimizes data extraction, they are able pull data using VADP and CBT with minimal impact to the production environment. Using the SLAs and policies, data can then be moved off to an object storage solution (think Amazon but many are supported). They claim that it virtually eliminates your RTO since recovery simply means bringing up the VM or SQL DB in the remote location. This would be done with the data living on the Rubrik itself until the data can be moved (vMotioned) back to primary storage.

One other cost saving feature is the indexing of all snapshot data. If a single file is needed for a restore (say a 50 GB MDF), but it lives on a volume that is 400 GB and contains other data, instead of incurring the cost of the 400 GB transfer out of <insert cloud storage provider here>, you only incur the cost of the 50 GB MDF. This is also possible with a single file restore out of a VMDK.

Hardware Summary:

2U “Brik”

4 Dual Proc Nodes per Brik

30K IOPS per Brik

1.2 GBps throughput per Brik

30 TB RAW (most dense config)

Scales to over 40 nodes easily

Software Summary:

Web-Scale architecture

Atlas Scale Out file system

Compression

Global Inline Dedupe

Replication

Single File Restore

Supports all cloud providers and object stores

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