by Arjan | Apr 21, 2015 | Rubrik
Last week I had a great conversation with Bipul Sinha, Mike Tornincasa and Julia Lee about their new adventure: Rubrik. The conversation focussed on the new technology that Rubrik brings in an old fashioned site of the IT infrastructure, the backup (and recovery) site.
As not all of you might know, Bipul is a very well known gentleman in the startup world. In his former/present life (sorry, I meant career) he was a well known VC with a lot of great companies he helped to set up. Companies like Nutanix, PernixData and others are started in the last couple of years and really changed the IT landscape. This looks like a strange move, going from VC to CEO of a Startup in a segment that’s not that well known for it’s capability to change…
But as with most of the startups, changing perspective and making sure a customer gets, what a customer needs, is not easy and in need of a person like Bipul to guide one in the right direction. Providing a game changing solution that will help the business move to a better performing, easy to scale and easy to manage environment is key here. Companies are challenged with so many changes these days and so many marketing shit like Software Defined everything, cloud, webscale IT and so on, while struggling maintaining their environments, most of them just want a way to make things better. Bipul and his team have seen (and provided) the change needed for better scale, easier management and moving to the next level of infrastructure.
Making sure your data is save, whereever it resides, is a important to every company. And most backup vendors have some kind of backup tool, but most of the time it is a solution for one silo in the backup environment. Focussed on virtualization, some on tape, some on cloud, and so on. But it always seems to be one of these and they always seem to need resources (CPU/Mem/Storage) from your excisting environment to backup your environment. Off course, there are backup solutions that brings their own hardware, but it’s always for a certain use case, and to make sure your data is save in the changing IT world of today requires something new.
An administrator is a human (really ;P) just like you. And as a human being they like simplicity and efficiency just like us. When the first mobile phones came to market, most people were amazed by the possibilities that came with this. When the Iphone came and changed the way mobile apps were being used, making it that easy to install and use the applications, people were even more amazed. Now almost a decade later we’re all used to that kind of simplicity. Even the most sceptic people are slowly moving towards Ipad’s, Microsoft Surface or other tablets because of their ease of use. An administrator wants the same thing. Spin it up, and making sure he’ll only needs to add more capacity (that’s with performance included) if the system tells him so. He wants to concentrate on giving the user the experience they want, and not firefighting the environment all day long just to start over again the next day.
In IT things are going quick. 10 years ago you probably had a mobile for one (maybe two) reasons. Reaching out to other people, by call or text, and using it as an agenda. That was it, for most of us. Fast forward ten years and were using our phones in a complete other way. Calling is almost gone, and if we do call we like to use things like Skype because it’s free… But these days we use our phones for surfing the web, social media, watching television/movies, watching the weather forecast and so on. Things change fast, not only with your phone but even more in the datacenters around the world.
10 years ago your average datacenter would look something like this:
Server hardware for compute (and some local storage) and a SAN or NAS for your shared storage, making a couple of racks for typical datacenter not uncommon.
Fast forward again 10 years, and a lot of companies are building their datacenter like this:
Converged, Hyperconverged, WebscaleIT, give it a name, but what companies are looking for is high performance, easy to scale and simplistic infrastructure. Making this change is not going to happen over a year, more like a decade. But with companies like Nutanix, Simplicity and big companies like VMware (EVO) things will change quicker. The common use cases for Hyperconverged (VDI/Test/DEV) are relatively easy to convince where the strength of hyperconverged is, and now that hyperconverged has proven his reliability for a couple of years, more and more companies move their production workloads to hyperconverged too.
With Hyperconverged and cloud the way to backup is changing too. Traditional backup vendors are able to provide you with some solutions in this change of compute usage, but that’s not always the case. That’s where Rubrik comes in.
If Apple is the company that made the mobile world change, Rubrik will probably do the the same for the backup market. And although the two are completely different the first (Apple) can not operate without the second (Rubrik). What would you think if a something goes wrong at apple and they just tell you, all pictures you moved (saved) to iCloud are gone and we can’t retrieve them because we don’t have a backup? Hell breaks loose on earth, Apple will be gone in a couple of days, and people will look for solutions where their data is save. As said the first can not live without the other. Which backup Apple uses is not relevant, replication is great, but if a virus would affect data, it might just impact all systems, not only the data in the primary datacenter (if that would be what Apple uses ;P). No data needs to backup.
But with traditional backup, a lot calculation comes into account to make sure resources aren’t over utilized. Because a lot of the traditional backup solutions use those resources during the quiet hours within a company, this might be no problem. But a lot of companies are using their infrastructure 24/7 these days. With the Internet of Things closing your company during night time is killing. Reaching people across the globe is easy, and most companies are trying to do this or are moving to this. And so it’s getting more important to be able to make sure your environment won’t stall during backup hours, as well as making sure you’ll have your backup to fall back to in case of an emergency.
Rubrik will change the way we are thinking of backup. The software will be intuitive, easy to use and to the point, like IOS, Android and Windows Phone. But Rubrik will be based on commodity hardware, which will leverage Flash to meet the performance needs of these days. Making this change in backup with software and hardware is something I really look forward to. There is so much more to say about Rubrik, but it will just have to wait a bit, as I’m sure I’ll write about them more often. But I just wanted to give you a feel of what I thought of when I first had contact with this company. In the next posts I’ll dive into their technology more and figure try to figure out what’s really under the hood, in hardware as well as in software.
I’m not the first to have been writing about Rubrik, and I recommend you to read the following post too:
Chris Mellor:
Stealthy upstart Rubrik: We’ll make enterprise data “beautiful”
Duncan Epping:
Startup intro: Rubrik. Backup and Recovery redefined
Cormac Hogan:
A quick introduction to Rubrik
And don’t forget to visit Rubriks own website HERE
by Arjan | Nov 7, 2012 | Storage Field Day 2, Storage Field Day 2012
Well to be honest the title should say: And if you’re going to San Jose (CA) because that’s where I’m heading right now (although I’ll land at San Francisco airport). For thursday and friday we’ll be with an a couple of independent bloggers visiting some really exciting companies in the bay area. But that for the next blog 😉
For tomorrow I’d like to invite to come to San Jose and join us for the TechField Day Next-Generation Storage Symposium. There is a great line-up of companies and speakers, that will go in depth on a couple of the storage questions many storage peeps have these days.
First, let’s take a look at the people and companies presenting (in random order):
About Nexsan
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California, Nexsan Corporation provides a comprehensive range of enterprise-class, easy-to-use and efficient system solutions that offer customers the ultimate value proposition when it comes to meeting their ever-evolving storage requirements. Our hardware and software products uniquely combine the benefits of cost-effective performance, power and space efficiency, density, ease of use, outstanding scalability and unmatched reliability to provide Highly Efficient Storage (HES) performance and functionality.
About NimbusData
Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. develops award-winning Sustainable Storage® systems, the most intelligent, efficient and fault-tolerant solid state storage platform engineered for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Combining low-latency flash memory hardware, comprehensive data management and protection software, and highly-scalable multiprotocol storage features, Nimbus systems deliver dramatically greater performance at a significantly lower operating cost than conventional disk-based primary storage arrays, all at a comparable acquisition cost.
About Permabit
Permabit is a recognized leader in data efficiency technology. We enable OEMs to leverage their R&D investment, increase margin, accelerate time to market and achieve competitive advantage. Permabit Albireo software massively improves performance and efficiency of data creation, transmission and storage. Solutions built with Albireo are being delivered by leading hardware, software and service providers. Our partners include Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), LSI, StoneFly, and Overland Storage.
About PureStorage
Pure Storage has a simple mission: to enable the widespread adoption of flash in the enterprise data center.
About Scale Computing
Founded in 2007, Scale Computing has led the way in unified, scale-out, enterprise class storage for small and medium-sized enterprises. The company is rapidly growing with offices in California, Indianapolis and London with global distribution partners.
Our Intelligent Clustered Operating System (ICOS) technology has won dozens of awards including Storage Networking World’s Best Practices, PC Mall’s Innovator of the Year Award, and Network World’s Top Nine Storage Companies to Watch. In 2009, Forbes named Scale Computing one of America’s Most Promising Companies.
About SolidFire
SolidFire believes traditional storage is way too slow, far too complex, and much too expensive to deliver the infrastructure large-scale cloud computing environments demand.
We are passionate about delivering high-performance and high-efficiency storage systems to cloud service providers. In addition to building a great product, SolidFire is growing our world class team of people and looking for employees who want to work in a collaborative, supportive and high-energy company culture.
About Startboard Storage Systems
Starboard Storage tackles the toughest storage problem facing Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) IT administrators today — managing today’s application workloads that include unstructured, virtualized and structured data. The Starboard Storage AC Series delivers on the promise of sophisticated yet easy-to-manage storage for modern application workload environments.
About Tegile
Tegile Systems is pioneering a new generation of affordable feature-rich storage arrays that are dramatically faster, and can store more data than standard arrays. Incorporating Tegile’s unique metadata handling technology, MASS™, Zebi arrays deliver caching and on the fly de-duplication and compression for primary storage. Customers in the financial services, manufacturing, government, legal, healthcare and transportation industry sectors have deployed Zebi as primary storage in virtualized server, virtualized desktop (VDI), file services and database environments as well as for replicated storage. The company is led by a successful team of industry veterans and is committed to a philosophy of “customer first.”
Also the following famous speakers and moderators:
About Chris M Evans
An industry veteran with over 22 years’ experience in IT. Over his career Chris has provided consultancy and advice to a wide range of customers and industry segments. Chris runs his own storage consultancy (Brookend Limited) and recently co-founded Langton Blue Limited, to focus on resolving IT related business issues.
About Howard Marks
In over 25 years as an independent consultant Howard has built and/or reengineered server and storage infrastructures and networks for organizations from Borden Foods and The State University of New York at Purchase to accounting and law firms. He started testing and reviewing products at PC Magazine in the late 80s and has written hundreds of articles and product reviews for Network World, Network Computing and InformationWeek amongst others. He’s spoken at Comdex, Interop, Networks Expo and developed training programs for organizations including JP Morgan and American Express. Where other analysts typically have marketing or sales backgrounds Howard’s continuing involvement with users facing real problems brings a perspective those users find more useful.
About Robin Harris
StorageMojo is published by TechnoQWAN LLC which was founded by me, Robin Harris, in 2006 as an independent analysis and consultancy focused on emerging IT technologies, products and markets. My blogs, StorageMojo and Storage Bits at ZDnet are ranked 10th and 11th out of 400 IT analyst blogs and have been linked to from the Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, e-Week, ComputerWorld and hundreds of other sites.
About Scott D. Lowe
Scott Lowe has worked in the technology field since 1994, starting his career as a jack of all trades handling networking duties, database administration/programming projects and help desk support. Scott has also held positions as the Associate Director of IT in charge of network services for a private college in upstate NY, the lead network analyst for the City of Gaithersburg, MD and as a Systems Engineer for Thomson Financial. In 2001, Scott assumed his first full-time management role as the Director of IT for the National Association of Attorneys General. Scott was most recently the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at a private Missouri college where he was a hand-on leader providing primary support for the virtualization environment alongside his other responsibilities.
About Stephen Foskett
Stephen Foskett is a pack rat personally, though I’m the opposite professionally! I’ve worked as a vendor-independent IT/business consultant to end users for more than a decade, managing services and “doing the work” at companies like Paranet, StorageNetworks, GlassHouse Technologies, Contoural, Nirvanix, and now as Foskett Services.
So if this didn’t already made you want to come to this very promising symposium, maybe my top 3 topics will change your choice (click on them for more info):
Really hope to see you tomorrow at this awesome event!
Arjan
