The enhancements, which include support for Oracle RMAN and SQL, as well as the Hyper-V and Nutanix Acropolis hypervisors, strengthen the Rubrik enterprise play.
Rubrik’s well-attended session at the Pure Accelerate event
SAN FRANCISCO – Palo Alto-based Rubrik has launched its ninth product release – which it is terming Alta – and the one which it says is its most significant. While the company was selling into the enterprise before, Alta significantly upgrades their strength in that market, adding important support for key new applications and hypervisors, as well as new cloud services.
Rubrik came out of stealth in 2015 and launched its product that year. They make a data management solution that simplifies backup and data protection while allowing enterprises to manage their data in the hybrid cloud.
“Alta is a huge release for us,” said Mark Smith, Rubrik’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development. “This is our release for the enterprise. It gives us broad platform support to be able to go after all enterprise customers globally.”
Smith said that they had been selling into the enterprise before, but that there were major gaps in their application coverage which have now been addressed.
“Previously we were focused on VMware, Linux and Windows,” Smith said. “We have now added support for Oracle RMAN, which is significant because it is the most used of all the databases. This support also aligns well with our partnership with Pure Storage, because Oracle is a huge target for Pure.”
Smith also stressed the importance of Rubrik’s new support for Microsoft’s SQL Server. Alta adds new live mount recovery capabilities for physical SQL, providing simple recovery and near-zero RTOs. Enterprises can now – for the first time – power on SQL Server directly on Rubrik to any point in time, obtaining instant access to data without having to move it.
“The new Oracle and SQL support will allow us to call on all enterprises, not just a select few,” Smith said.
Rubrik Alta brings new hypervisor integration as well, adding support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix’s Acropolis.
“Hyper-V is huge and growing, and Acropolis is huge for us because we have a very significant partnership with Nutanix,” Smith said. “Nutanix partners with us because they have a more nuanced relationship with other players like Cohesity. Cohesity completes with them on the storage side, and we don’t.”
Alta has also added new CloudOn instantiation services.
“This substantiates Rubrik in the AWS cloud, adding new capabilities for us there,” Smith said. This includes enhanced application mobility and a flexible, cost-effective solution for disaster recovery, test/dev, and analytics use cases.
“Before, we had the ability to hook data into the cloud, but CloudOn now lets us do it with the full application stack,” Smith added.
At the present time, this is likely to be more useful in Europe than in North America.
“To date we have seen a lot more running of Rubrik in the cloud in Europe,” Smith said. “It’s not yet that common in the U.S., where we still tend to run more in the data centre.”
Smith noted that at the end of April, Rubrik closed a large series D financing series, while they still had a lot of money unspent, and some analysts wondered why all the additional capital was needed.
“Alta is the answer about what we are doing with the money,” he said. “Since we now cover all operating environments and all major enterprise applications, this will really let us double down, even triple down, on the enterprise market.”
Smith said that Rubrik’s attendance at the Pure Storage Accelerate event here has been a spectacular success.
“Our integration with Pure Storage is so important, because there are a lot of enterprise customers here, looking to improve the backup and recovery that they have today,” Smith said. “Brent Allen, Pure’s Canadian country manager, took customers to our booth yesterday.”
Smith mentioned that Rubrik is showing strong momentum in the Canadian market.
“Jon Rahmani, our Canadian country manager, just hired two new sales teams, up from four. We are doing very well there.”
