In this episode I’m with Chris Wahl, technical evangelist at Rubrik, and we talk about:

– a short introduction about the company and its mission;
– a few words about the architecture of the product;
– cloud integration and features.

Enjoy the show.

Full transcript of the show

Enrico: Welcome everyone to a new episode of Juku beats. Today I’m with Chris Wahl the new evangelista of Rubrik.
Chris Wahl: Hey, I like the evangelista flavor that you put on there Enrico, glad to be on your podcast.
Enrico: Thank you very much. I borrowed it from In Tech We Trust podcast. I listen to it last weekend, it’s really nice. You know the podcast is very short, we have just five minutes and I start immediately with the questions. First of all about Rubrik, Rubrik is a very new company, it’s a new player in the backup market with the company out to start I think just a couple of months ago. Can you tell us more about the company, the mission, what it does, everything?
Chris Wahl: Sure, I’ll keep it succinct for you and quite frankly because Rubrik is so easy and simple to set up, it’s very easy for me to also explain it in a short period of time. Let me do my best job here. Rubrik is in the converged data management market. What that means is that we provide a holistic platform or a fabric if you will, a hardware software blend that you can use to protect your data. We’ll do backups onto the platform, we’ll also put those same backups into the cloud, we [deduplicate 00:01:25] and compress and do all those other fancy space efficiencies on the data that goes into platform, and we have some really cool consumer grade tech such as a Google like search feature so you can look at all the data across all of your backups regardless of it being within the platform or in the cloud.
You can search all that in real time and we have that cool [devops 00:01:45] vibe in that everything we do consumes an API. All of our front end dash board uses the same API that you as a customer will have access to. So if you want to script out various restore actions or what not in order to make copies of a backup so that you can look at the data inside of it or perhaps do some [dev test 00:02:03] against a backup that was taken a couple of hours ago or years ago, or weeks ago you can and we’ll actually mount the backup directly on Rubrik and that way you can take advantage of our hybrid combination of flash and capacity disk. So it’s a pretty cool product but the primary use case is data protection.
Enrico: Sounds really good and I know a little bit about Rubrik because you briefed me last week and I know that it is a scale out appliance which is practically as you said, easy to use and maintain. Can you give us an idea about how it works internally? Where is the innovation in the back end?
Chris Wahl: Certainly, and I’m glad you brought that up because it is definitely a true scale out system. It’s a shared nothing or master-less system in that every node that you put in the appliance within it’s form factor it’s a 2U form factor with 4 nodes based off super micro commodity hardware in which we wrote our own scale out file system and as well as the search and all that kind of jazz. All of the task systems, the dashboard the API, the scale out file system, everything in there is pretty much built from scratch from the guys that worked at places like Google and Facebook and VMware and so on.
When you want to scale out the product or even scale it down, you can go up or down, you simply add or remove a node and the fabric is made aware of that fact so you can say, “Hey, Rubrik I have a new node, here’s the IP or here’s the link local address” and it will absorb that node into the pool of resources and scale out to the size of that node. If you want to get rid of it, maybe you are scaling down a site to put the node elsewhere, you could also do that. So it’s very elastic and easy to change in a very linear manner.
Enrico: Yes, that’s really interesting. You mentioned cloud a lot of times so you have this ability to move old backups to the cloud. So can I use this for example to implement the best [DR 00:04:06]? What are the actual use cases that you propose for that?
Chris Wahl: Yeah that’s also a good question. Tape’s going to be around probably for a long time and we’re not necessarily saying it’s going to go away in a short period of time, but I manage tapes and I kind of hate those things. I think cloud is a better platform in order to put your archives, or your older backups to so the product today will connect to Amazon S3 and based on the SLA that you give Rubrik it will automatically age out backups that are on premises and put them into the cloud and that gives you that multi-site, I have some data local, I have some data in the cloud. The search and all the data efficiencies work across both.
For disaster recovery you could absolutely keep data in the cloud and the cool thing is even the Rubrik meta data goes into the cloud so if you were to loose the full site, you had a meteor crash in Austin where I’m at or Italy where you’re at it takes out the data center, you still have all the data in the cloud as well as the meta data to restore back into a replacement Rubrik. And then we’ve got some other features coming out very shortly that I think you’ll be excited about around disaster recovery, that keep your eyeball out over the next couple of weeks.
Enrico: Thank you very much, and where can we find you and Rubrik on the internet?
Chris Wahl: Sure, it’s pretty simple. For Rubrik, you can go to Rubrik.com or the Twitter handle is Rubrik.Inc, that’s Rubrik I-n-c and then I’m Chris Wahl I’m @chriswahl on Twitter, it’s W-a-h-l and my blog is wahlnetwork.com and if you want to meet me in person I’ll be at VMWorld 2015 in the US and AMIA and I’ve got stickers and all sorts of cool swag so come give me a high five or a handshake and lets talk some more about Rubrik.
Enrico: I will be there for sure at least for the stickers.
Chris Wahl: Everyone loves stickers.
Enrico: Thank you very much for your time, Chris.
Chris Wahl: Thank you.
Enrico: Bye.