Enhancements in Rubrik’s latest release include certification for SAP HANA, instant recovery capabilities for Oracle database instant recovery and improved Microsoft Office 365 protection on the Rubrik Polaris SaaS platform.

Data management vendor Rubrik has announced the Andes 5.0 release of their Cloud Data Management platform. Rubrik gives each of its releases names, which last for the duration of that release cycle. The 4.x cycle of the platform was named Alta.

“Our 4.x release was all about expanding the platform to more enterprise and hybrid cloud use cases,” said Chris Wahl, Rubrik’s Chief Technologist. “Now we are taking it to pain points around digital transformation. We have stitched together a hybrid cloud model. Now we need to cover more of the mission-critical uses in the data centre that we haven’t addressed in the past. We want to deepen our bench, to take a lot of pain out of the fragmentation where customers want to keep the light on on-prem, but also expand into the cloud.”

The new and expanded use cases include new support for the SAP HANA in-memory database, and expanded support for Oracle and for cloud-native applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and NoSQL databases.

“SAP HANA protection is brand new for Andes 5.0,” Wahl said. “We are now a certified vendor integration with HANA.” This enables database administrators to use native SAP tools like SAP Hana Cockpit and Studio, to quickly provide point-in-time recoveries with intelligent log management. It also lets them defend against Ransomware through data immutability.

Support for Oracle has been expanded with the addition of the ability to Live Mount Oracle databases. Live Mount provides recovery and clones in a few seconds, to maximize business uptime and accelerate application development.

“We’ve had Oracle support for quite some time,” Wahl indicated. “In the past, we worked with the database administrators and provided RMAN scripting to protect and recover Oracle. With Live Mount for Oracle, we are stepping this up. This was something that required a fair bit of customization with the database to avoid issues with existing workloads.  In addition, all of the heavy lifting that a database admin has to craft by hand is now automated. That’s a big heavy-hitter.”

Office 365 recovery capabilities have also been enhanced.

“You can now use our Polaris SaaS platform to simplify Office 365 backup for Mail and Calendar without any deployment of software,” Wahl said. “You just log into the Polaris dashboard and point to it, and we do all the protection and ingestion with no footprint.”

Rubrik Andes also enables Rubrik Datos IO, the NoSQL data protection platform they acquired earlier this year, to back up NoSQL databases directly to the Rubrik Cloud Data Management platform.

“We have also developed a new feature, Elastic App Service [EAS], which makes sure that Datos data has a place to live,” Wahl stated. “EAS is a landing point for database backups, which provides all the scripting. Once you tag a volume, it will Autotune itself for a particular workload.”  EAS supports Oracle, SQL Server, mySQL, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA, MongoDB, and Cassandra.

An enhancement to protection for the InterSystems Caché, database relied upon by leading Electronic Health Record provider Epic is also in this release.

“We have provided protection for Epic EHR environments in the past, and now we are expanding that,” Wahl said. “The previous iteration assumed that the environment was virtual. Now physical support has been added, so that Rubrik can talk directly to the storage frame.” The first storage vendor’s hardware to be supported is Pure Storage, and this will be expanded to other vendors.

Another new item is NAS Direct Archive, which manages massive unstructured datasets across both data centre and cloud storage systems.

“We now protect NAS systems of all sorts,” Wahl said. “Andes talks to the customer’s NAS vendor of choice and works with their APIs and determines a long-term retention destination. It manages everything without the need for a large Rubrik footprint.”

In addition, Rubrik introduced Rubrik Accelerator for Microsoft Azure, a joint purpose-built solution that gives customers a single solution to protect and manage data from on-premises to Microsoft Azure.

“This is completely new, and it’s something that our channel partners will love,” Wahl said. “We’ve tried to make using the public cloud as simple as possible, but we wanted to make it even easier. The goal of Rubrik Accelerator is to make it so easy to onboard into Azure that its not even a second thought.”

While Rubrik has relationships with all the big hyperscalers, the partnership with Azure around this type of solution is the first for Accelerator.

“Azure is excellent from partnership perspective, and it was simple for us to get us together and shake hands,” Wahl said. “This is our first such partnership – but we also have very strong relationships with Google and Amazon.”