Ice Cube and Kevin Durant join Rubrik

Rubrik 4.1 – Whats New?

You can do it put your back into it

Rubrik have returned from VMworld victorious having won two awards, the first for best in show and the other gold for data protection best of show. Plus they now have more celebrities associated with the company than are in Oprah’s address book.

Ice Cube and Kevin Durant join Rubrik

Enhanced Microsoft Support

Last week they took the show on the road to MS Ignite where a series of enhancements were announced in Rubrik version 4.1.  4.0 Alta was a major release, if you missed it check out my blog post which summarises the key functionality, plus as a bonus features pictures of Cookie Monster.

Given the announcement was made at MS Ignite let’s check out the Microsoft enhancements first, 4.0 introduced the concept of restoring VMware vm’s into the AWS cloud.  4.1 extends this functionality to Azure. This technology which is termed CloudOn can be orchestrated from within the Rubrik interface and is a simple two click process.  The sizing of the target instance is determined by reading the local VMX file of the VM.

Rubrik CloudON Azure allows VMware VM migrations

ClouON has several use cases, DR seems obvious and removes the need for a dedicated data centre. Test and Dev in a similar manner allows you to quickly stand up and remove instances as needed. Following the recent announcements regarding VMware AWS, Ravello Cloud Rubrik adds to this ever-growing list of lift and shift options for moving to the cloud by offering a permanent failover option.

Further Microsoft related announcements included full support for SCVMM and Azure Stack support.

Multi-tenancy

Security/manageability was enhanced in this release with the introduction of multi-tenancy. This essentially allows the creation of logical management boundaries similar to what would be called domains in Windows land. In Rubrik terminology these management boundaries are established with organisations. Once you have established an organisation you can then assign roles to grant privileges. Roles vary from global admins who are the big dogs with complete rights down to end users who have basic restore capabilities.

Google Cloud

The list of supported cloud providers is extended beyond AWS and Azure to also include Google Cloud. All classes of Google Cloud Storage are possible targets ranging from cold line where you would store long term data to multi regional for more critical data. AWS Glacier is added as a potential storage target for a job. Although Glacier is the cheapest target for storage caution needs to be exercised when placing data here since retrieval costs can be significant. Use cases here would be long term storage for data that was would be unlikely to be needed. Additionally Rubrik now offers Vault functionality on S3 and Glacier which protects data from being deleted. This can be useful for legal and regulatory compliance

You can read more in the official press release and this nice summary from Ed Morgan