There’s a new player in the growing converged backup and recovery appliance market, and it’s not one that many may recognize.
Palo Alto, CA-based Rubrik is a startup, but it’s one with some clout in its team.
At its core, it’s led by former Google, Facebook and VMware engineers. The $10 million it raised through venture capital also partly came from venture partners in Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Veritas.
Its product called the “Converged Data Management Platform”, though not entirely unique in concept, is different in its execution.
“There’s been a lack of innovation in the last 10 years in the backup and restore solution space,” said Julia Lee, director of product marketing at Rubrik. “We’re converging the backup and recovery software with web-scale tech that Google and Facebook are using.”
The company said that, traditionally, software had to be “sewn together” with various storage solutions that lacked computing power. This was cumbersome in both initial setup as well as when it came time to scale.
To counter this, like solutions offered by Violin Memory and Arcserve, Rubrik tries to cut through the clutter of legacy solutions by offering storage with compute. It also currently integrates with AWS, although more cloud solutions are on their way.
However, it does one key thing differently in that its appliance hardware is being offered by various partners.
“It runs pretty much on any commodity hardware,” said Arvind Nithrakashyap, Rubrik’s co-founder and CTO, whose previous titles include co-founder of Oracle Exadata and principal engineer at Oracle Cluster.
He told CDN that while Rubrik’s platform will initially ship with hardware provided by partners in its early access program, eventually the idea is to provide the software alone.
For now, the default configuration is four-node configuration that includes 20 TB of usable spinning disc storage coupled with 4TB of flash storage. While the company is still actively seeking partners and has yet to breach the Canadian market, Lee emphasized that it was 100 per cent channel driven and that the launch window is summer this year.
