Rubrik backup appliance adds physical platforms to hybrid cloud

Rubrik has added physical platform backup and hybrid cloud archive capability to its flash-equipped data backup appliance with the announcement of its Firefly release.

Firefly allows customers to back up physical workloads on Microsoft SQL and Linux server platforms and hold this data as backups locally on its hardware or as archived data on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure clouds.

Rubrik’s backup and archive appliances are based on SuperMicro servers and are equipped with flash and spinning disk with capacities ranging from about 37TB to 98TB. These run Rubrik’s backup software and a proprietary distributed file system, the Rubrik Cloud-Scale File System.

At deployment, a full backup is taken, with incremental forevers/snapshots after that, and all data is deduplicated globally after ingest, with the flash capacity used to speed that process.

Customers can set policies that specify how long data should remain as backups – which can be accessed for production use from Rubrik hardware, which shows up as an NFS file share – before they are sent to either an in-house physical archive device or to the cloud.

In Rubrik, backed-up data is indexed and searchable and almost instantly recoverable, so eliminating the wait that often occurs between user requests to access a file and restoring it from backup.

But while Rubrik aims to provide a universal data store with near-instant access, it is only able to provide this on limited environments. Although Rubrik has added backup from some physical platforms, it is limited elsewhere to backing up from VMware virtual environments only.

According to EMEA vice-president Karl Driessen, this is simply down to the current stage in the company’s evolution and further platforms will be supported, including more virtual and physical (server and endpoint) environments.

Backup appliances take backup software and embed it into hardware with disk storage built in.

They provide a simple way to deliver backup services without the need for specialist backup staff to manage them. That makes backup appliances well suited to SMEs and branch offices of large enterprises, while the larger backup appliances are also appropriate for smaller datacentre operations.

Rubrik nodes are 2U hardware and provide storage connectivity via NFS and iSCSI. The four models come with up to 12 spinning-disk HDDs and two to four flash drives. A virtual appliance version – Rubrik Edge – is available for deployment in remote office environments.