As someone who loves the latest and greatest technology, I’ve always felt that backup software didn’t advance at the same pace as other technologies. Just a few short years ago I was peeling off barcode labels and applying them to tapes, followed by documenting these barcodes on an Excel spreadsheet and entering them one at a time on a terribly designed website for an off-site tape storage vendor so we can schedule the pick-up. It was dull and tedious…the kind of job you wish you could automate, or at least go into auto-pilot and let your mind wander! But that was not possible, because although the chances of me actually needing these tapes again was almost zero, if I DID need it, I wanted to be 100% sure it was right.
When we started replacing customer’s previous backup solutions with disk to disk solutions like Veeam, I finally felt backup software moved forward. Even the interface was nice, and off-site storage got a lot easier. Removing tape libraries removed a HUGE administrative task from IT teams, but as cloud technologies such as AWS improved and started offering some insanely cheap storage in the form of Amazon Glacier, everyone began asking “How can I leverage Amazon Glacier for my off-site backups?”. The answer really boiled down to a couple options:
- Script this yourself using one of Amazon’s many methods (SDK, CLI, powershell, etc.)
- Run a 3rd party application to schedule the copy to the cloud
In either case you are now supporting TWO backup platforms: Software like Veeam to backup your servers and additional software or scripts/schedules to handle the off-site piece. Even if you are comfortable with this approach, the issues that we face when working with hybrid cloud start to compound when you begin adding workloads in your AWS Instance. How do you backup those servers? A 3rd platform?
It starts to become clear that something needed to be designed for this hybrid datacenter design. With cloud adoption skyrocketing, someone needed to design a backup solution with modern design principles:
- Cloud-Based
- Software-Defined
- Simple
- Efficient
Enter Rubrik! Rubrik has designed their solution with these principles in mind and it shows. It really does feel like the next leap in backup software, as no one else has been this successful at creating this single pane of glass for all of your backup, DR and Archival needs, regardless if they are on-prem or in the cloud. It truly decouples data from the datacenter!
Searching for a particular virtual machine within the Rubrik dashboard returns results from both on-prem and cloud sources, and they are treated exactly the same. You can group machines by service levels (SLA’s) and an SLA can consist of both cloud and on-prem servers. Think of the added simplicity of being able to manage all workloads in exactly the same way. And off-site archival to S3-based storage is built right in!
Architecturally, any engineer would be impressed with the design. From flash-optimized storage, a distributed model for metadata storage and task execution, to a cloud-scale file system built from the ground up, there is plenty to be impressed with. IT Managers will be impressed with the level of protection Rubrik provides while greatly reducing administrative overhead. If you are looking for a backup solution that is forward thinking and ready to address the issues your organization is facing (or will surely face) in the coming years, Rubrik could be the answer. Reach out to us to learn more about this incredible product and to see if it would be a fit in your environment.
Written By: Lee Jolly, LookingPoint, Inc. Network Engineer