New cloud native capabilities will have particular value for Rubrik channel partners, who will be able to offer customers more strategic services rather than providing tactical implementation.
Rubrik Alta 4.2
Data management vendor Rubrik has announced the 4.2 release of their flagship product, which is named Alta for the 4x generation. The company is stressing that this release strengthens its capabilities in managing the hybrid cloud. It adds native support for AWS workloads. For traditional data centre workloads, Alta 4.2 extends support to AIX and Solaris. MSPs in particular are likely to benefit from the addition of native support for VMware vCloud Director.
“The thrust that we have gone into with this release is the hybrid cloud, and addressing pain points that customers and partners are both trying to address surrounding hybrid cloud adoption,” said Chris Wahl, Rubrik’s Chief Technologist. “The 4.2 release is laser- focused on that particular pain point.”
Citing data from Gartner’s Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit, Wahl said that hybrid cloud was both a top priority and a major challenge. 70 per cent of respondents said that hybrid cloud was top of mind for them. At the same time, 32 per cent said that it was the largest data centre challenge that they face.
“We are showing off our strength in the hybrid cloud, and trying to strengthen that opportunity for our partners,” Wahl said. “There’s a lot of messaging out there from new kids on the block who are just running in Amazon. But we can cover a more salient range of issues for customers. It’s tough for them if they have to deal with all sorts of different vendors. We can offer a solution for hybrid cloud that an eight year-old can operate, that tackles many applications, and it all looks and feels the same. It lets us tackle all these hybrid workloads in a high value manner.”
For the public cloud, Rubrik now offers Amazon Web Services EC2-native backup and lifecycle management to index, catalogue and protect any application running on EC2, whether Rubrik is deployed in a data centre or on AWS. This makes it possible to run everything on the cloud.
Chris Wahl, Rubrik’s Chief Technologist
“It provides a unified method of providing policy-based protection for workloads,” Wahl indicated. “We are addressing EC2 backups, because handling the sprawl of those production and non-production workloads is a major challenge.”
This is a significant new element for Rubrik’s channel.
“It is important for resellers, and MSPs, and all the people in the ecosystem,” Wahl said. “These cloud native capabilities facilitate high margin, high value services, but there has been a huge challenge in tackling them. They are not a transactional tactical deployment. This will allow partners to elevate their trusted advisor position. EC2 gives a set of APIs, but you have to build things yourself. We provide that here, so partners can provide more strategic advice to customers, rather than just tactical work.”
Rubrik Alta 4.2 now integrates with VMware vCloud Director for the first time.
“vCloud Director is used by multi-tenanted environments to create an elastic private cloud,” Wahl said. “We have had a good history of working with MSPs who leverage it. Most of the MSP market has been able to use it without us providing support by using their in-house skillsets. Now, however, we have now made it productized and native to the interface. All the heavy lifting is now on our shoulders, and not on the MSPs.”
Rubrik does this with its Envoy service, which represents a service provider’s Rubrik cluster in a tenant network, making it easy for end-users to customize their backup services in a flexible, shared-everything private cloud, and to provide backup-as-a-service.
Rubrik also extended its support for traditional data centre applications within the context of a hybrid strategy, with new support for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris.
“Most of what I do is talk to customers, and they have to deal with a lot of challenges in siloed infrastructure,” Wahl stated. “With this support users of these platforms will be able to use our data management tools, and get the same Rubrik experience in Solaris that they get if they build on Amazon. There is no separate software or agents to install for these. It’s all native.”
Wahl said that Rubrik will extend support to additional legacy applications as the market demands it.
