back to article Rubrik's cube: Storage firm founder drenches us in upstart Kool-Aid

The intellectual firepower at the top of Rubrik’s founding engineering team is exceeded only by the relentless promotion of the company, its founders, engineers and prospects by CEO Bipul Sinha, a VC partner. We met Rubrik during a Silicon Valley IT press tour in December 2015. After drinking coffee and enjoying doughnuts ( …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      yes, eliminates tape....and the shitty software we have been using for years and continue to bend over for the right to pay for it. It's good stuff if you are a heavily virtualized shop. Worth a look.

  2. Lusty

    NetApp and many others do all this and more in primary storage. This product doesn't need to exist, clever though the team may be.

    1. Archaon

      Indeed. It looks like a good enough product, but it also looks very much like what everyone else already does. Nothing jumps out that can't be done with existing pre-configured backup appliances, or roll-your-own solutions (backup software plus tin of your choice - e.g. Veeam or Veritas).

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          More importantly, is that Capt 'n Crunch, including the boring bits, on that doughnut? Phht, when they are successful enough to put Lucky Charms (only the marshmallows obviously) on their doughnuts I might have a look at them.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "being constantly [..] told how humble the co-founders are"

    Sorry, humility does not advertise itself out loud. If you are indeed humble, the message gets across without being said. From what I gather here, they are anything but humble. They appear to have nailed the lavish presentation schtick, though.

    And infinitely scalable ? That falls flat by logic alone, but the buzzword bullshit alarm goes off as well.

    What I take from this article is that there is yet another startup playing doe-eyes in front and quietly sharpening a shiv in the back. The only question is how will these new wolves mix things up, and will they be able to ?

  4. RollTide14

    So what about the rest of my environment?

    Awesome, I've got a real slick backup appliance for my VMware environment.....now how am I supposed to back up the rest of it?

    I feel like consolidation is a long forgotten term in this new market. I understand these new appliances (rubrik, nutanix, etc) are extremely simple to use but is your environment still simple if you are managing 12 different technologies instead of 3?

    1. @miketrap

      Re: So what about the rest of my environment?

      You should check out Actifio. First and only enterprise-class data virtualization platform, 6-year head start on the new guys and the broadest support across applications, storage infrastructure types, and use cases.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I can eliminate the software layer of my backup solution and place an appliance that does all? I'm in. ALL of my issues in the past have been with crappy software and have been forced to choose the package that sucks less. While Rubrik currently does VMware only, other hypervisors are coming as well and bare metal SQL protection abilities I have been told. I know if I hear this many folks talking down on a new product, they must be onto something! I do not work for Rubrik.

    Chris Gurley has some good posts on his blog, worth a read. http://www.thegurleyman.com/

    1. RollTide14

      I work for a VAR....trust me I would love nothing more to take money out of the major backup SW vendors pockets and put it towards a legit backup solution. I just dont have any customers who are 100% virtual....closest one is 90% and a bunch of critical apps are still running on bare metal.

      I'm still amazed at the price tag associated with Commvault and the incompetence of the majority of their salesforce. You would think that Simpana was flying off the shelves the way they acted.

      1. Bcraig

        Yep, that's the issue with VM-only solution such as this and Veeam. I think that Rubrik is powerful enough that I would buy it to cover the virtual side and use a second product for the handful of bare metal and still come out cheaper that the major vendors. Also had customers back up physical servers to a protected VM using native tools and backing up with their VM backup solution.

  6. Lynrd

    Obviously Psycho Doughnuts

    The Cap'n Crunch is a dead giveaway - those are some of San Jose's best doughnuts. Obviously the red carpet was rolled out for El Reg.

    Re: the rest of the platform - I read the article twice and still cannot find the disruption here. "Job based" vs. "Policy based" is marketing fluff as both approaches basically stem from the same workflow - you built your jobs around a defined policy or SLA. The only difference is what order you do them in.

    Data protection mechanisms can be evaluated largely on the basis of data integrity and speed of recovery. Reading the article a third time, I still cannot find a whole lot of information where either of those things are dramatically improved by this solution over current solutions on the market. This is not intended to be a knock on the product or company, but maybe marketing needs to figure out how to communicate their differentation...or fix the press kit.

    A lot of smart engineers can come up with a lot of great solutions. The thing is, not all of the solutions have problems associated with them.

  7. liac

    "Empty barrels make the most sound"

  8. CPU

    Very late to market

    Rubrik's are trying to do what Veeam already does (and does well). NetApp does all of this in-storage.

    These guys are late and desperately trying to look like they have brought something new to the party- they haven't.

  9. Gostev

    Just for the record, these are completely false statements about Veeam:

    o Veeam uses MS SQL Server as catalog storage; availability is gone if SQL server goes corrupt.

    o Veeam does array integration with EMC, etc. “We don't need to do that because of our unique, app-consistent snapshots with parallel ingest from primary VMware infrastructure.”

    I am confident that "We are 2 - 3 x more storage efficient" claim is also a false one, but will wait for a trusted partner to perform a SxS testing before stating that.

  10. Huckleberry Muckelroy

    American Doughnuts!

    At first I thought they had to be English Doughnuts, similar to the English Candy drill in Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow".

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No hardware integration, no hyper-v (no. 2 hypervisor), no tape, only replicate to AWS Cloud... and if you need an extra 10% of storage you are going to have to buy a whole new controller ...

    I don't think they'll be expanding on their current "There are just 65 or so appliances in the field but Rubrik says it is growing"

  12. agonzalez

    This not new.... PBBA already exists since years ago

    Unitrends has been doing specialized PBBA (Purpose Built Backup Appliances) for years and can backup more than just VMware. Unitrends appliances can backup 3 hypervisors VMware, Hyper-V, Xen and over 40 guestos or physical servers at agent-based backup, including of course global deduplication, replication, instant recovery for test/dev purposes, etc

    On large enterprises you need to both agent-based and hypervisor based backups:

    http://blogs.unitrends.com/agent-agentless-backups-virtual-machines/

    "It's technology eliminates tape by letting people archive to public cloud"

    Unitrends supports both archive to cloud and tape. Why do you want to eliminate tape? there are still some uses cases for it at some companies.

    Veeam started years ago with the same only-virtualization vmware approach and had to add later tape and endpoint support due to customers requesting it and competition.

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