Nmedia - Fotolia
Rubrik adds Oracle, NoSQL and SAP Hana data protection
Scale-out backup appliance maker has already ticked most physical and virtual support boxes and is now filling out the details with enterprise application support
Backup software and appliance maker Rubrik has built on the broad platform additions of the past year to launch support for key enterprise applications including Oracle and NoSQL databases, SAP Hana and cloud-to-cloud data protection for Microsoft Office 365.
Last year, Rubrik rounded out broad platform support for data protection which means it can back up data on a wide range of physical, virtual and cloud platforms.
These include Windows and Linux physical servers, VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix hypervisors, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure native cloud backup.
This year, Rubrik extended its backup and data management support to applications running in AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS).
In this release – version 5, dubbed Andes – Rubrik has focused on specific enterprise workloads, said field CTO Emea, Filip Verloy.
“We want to make sure enterprise customers can fully on-board to the Rubrik platform and not rely on traditional backup,” he said.
First among these additions is support for Oracle databases, with Live Mount for Oracle, which allows restore of multi-terabyte databases in minutes, according to Verloy. This is effected by mounting the database on Rubrik flash cache rather than streaming an entire database copy.
There is similar support for SAP Hana backup and recovery, with the ability to use native SAP tools, such as SAP Hana Cockpit and Studio.
Support for NoSQL database protection – acquired from Datos IO in February – was previously limited to backup to AWS and Azure, but can now have a Rubrik cluster as a target.
A feature called NAS Direct Archive, meanwhile, allows customers – probably those with large, infrequently accessed datasets – to back up entire NAS repositories to locations other than the Rubrik cluster, most likely in the cloud for long-term retention.
Read more on backup
- Backup appliances in scale-out format allow data protection to be scaled easily by simply adding extra nodes. But is it an idea that’s ready for the enterprise?
- Applications that run in the cloud are protected, but only so much. For full protection of data generated by cloud-based apps, you need cloud-to-cloud backup.
Office 365 backup will now be possible directly to customers’ Azure block storage, rather than to the Rubrik storage environment.
This will be via Rubrik’s cloud-based Polaris software-as-a-service platform, which also provides an analytical overview of customer Rubrik deployments.
Rubrik’s software appliance can come on approved server hardware from Cisco, HPE or Dell with flash and spinning disk inside, with capacities for a minimum four-node cluster in the 64TB to 160TB range, depending on the hardware.
Clusters run Rubrik’s backup software and the Rubrik Cloud-Scale File System, which is a proprietary distributed file system.
Upon deployment, a full backup is taken, with incremental forevers/snapshots after that. All data is deduplicated globally after ingest.
Customers can set policies to specify how long data should be retained as a backup and which can be accessed for production use from Rubrik hardware. Rubrik backup data is seen as an NFS file share before being sent to either an in-house physical archive or the cloud.
Backed-up data is indexed and searchable and rapidly recoverable. Rubrik nodes provide storage connectivity via NFS and iSCSI. A virtual appliance version is available for remote office environments.