The first release since Rubrik acquired Datos IO earlier his year also makes major enhancements to the platform’s scale-out architecture and performance.

Data management vendor Rubrik has announced the release of Rubrik Datos IO 3.0, their first release of the NoSQL data protection platform since they acquired it earlier this year. The new release adds new capabilities such as being available as a Docker container or an Amazon Machine Image [AMI]. It also adds support for the Microsoft Azure cloud, completing Rubrik Datos IO’s support for the largest three clouds, as well as adding support for the Oracle cloud.

“This is our first release we were acquired, and the first since our 2.5 release last fall,” said Tarun Thakur, General Manager, Rubrik Datos IO, who had been CEO and co-founder of Datos IO. “We have always been focused on three core tenets. Enterprises are all focused today on digital transformation, looking to digitize ways they talk to their end customers so they can get closer to their customers. They are looking for a Customer 360 customer experience, to better understand customers so they can get stickier relationships with them. They are also shifting to cloud data platforms. Those were our drivers in 2014 when we founded the company and they remain our drivers today. What the acquisition did was provide us with enormous new resources around engineering and product management – resources needed to give the professional touch that our large enterprise customers demand. The acquisition didn’t change the roadmap. It did, however, let us double down on our focus.”

Rubrik acquired Datos IO because NoSQL databases, including MongoDB and Cassandra, are exploding in popularity in the enterprise.

“MongoDB is the number one player, which went from $0 to $3 billion in ten years,” Thakur said. “Almost every enterprise uses it for something. This market was becoming bigger and bigger and we provided Rubrik with the capabilities to address it that they did not have previously.”

Thakur stressed that Rubrik Datos IO 3.0 delivers enterprise-class features, massive scalability across hundreds of nodes and multiple clouds, and fast performance for NoSQL backup.

“The majority of our customers are Fortune 500, and the personas we sell to are the database administrators,” he said. “They used to be DB2, Oracle, and SQL administrators, and are now on applications like NoSQL. They want the same enterprise class features for backup that they were used to on these other databases, so we built those into the product for faster RTOs. They also need to be massively scalable. The average table in Cassandra is 20 TB, compared to 1 TB in SQL.”

The scalability is upgraded in Rubrik Datos IO 3.0.

“Rubrik Datos IO 3.0 is really a huge enhancement of the platform, which now has a multi-node scale-out architecture,” Thakur said. It can now seamlessly recover to and from changing database cluster topologies. Performance improvements have also been made for MongoDB backup and recovery, particularly those with high-change rate and sharded clusters spread across dozens or hundreds of nodes.

“Rubrik Datos IO can now also be deployed as a Docker container, something that is increasingly important as the majority of next generation applications are being deployed in the cloud,” Thakur indicated. “Datos IO already protected NoSQL inside Docker containers. But being able to deploy it as a Docker container greatly increases simplicity, something that Rubrik has always emphasized, and which we really took to heart with this release. Deployment in a Docker container frees you up from all that installation, because you don’t have to configure every node with Docker.”

Rubrik Datos IO 3.0 can now be deployed as an Amazon Machine Image as well.

“While the first age of cloud was Bring Your Own License, the second is ‘why do we have to make customers deploy in EC2 when we can give them a self-contained image’.” Thakur said. “What AMI does is bundle Amazon with Rubrik Datos IO when you spin up AMI. As with Docker, this eases installation and configuration sessions and improves workflow, because these apps are horizontally scalable.”

Thakur emphasized the centrality of customers to both the AMI and Docker initiatives.

“The AMI deployment was driven by Maxwell Health [an HR benefits management service in the AWS cloud], while the new container initiative was driven by Cisco, who is a major customer of ours as well as an investor,” he said.

Another enhancement is ultralight NoSQL Service Managers.

“These are application listeners, agents that watch changes in data in the databases,” Thakur indicated. “We also enhanced our monitoring to make it a lot richer.” The 3.0 release also adds streaming recovery for fast RTOs, express recovery for full disaster recovery scenarios, and database-level recovery for both MongoDB and Cassandra.

Finally, Rubrik Datos IO has completed its major cloud support, adding Microsoft Azure as well as Oracle Cloud.

“We had AWS support when we launched, and built in Google support before for Home Depot, one of our biggest customers, in another example of how our customers influence our journey,” Thakur said. “Lots of enterprise customers are flocking to Azure, particularly retail customers, as the majority of retail organizations prefer Google or Azure over Amazon. Azure support will be huge for us with large retailers who have NOSQL databases, given our focus on the enterprise and Fortune 500.”