Datacentre disruption, Rubrik style. Becoming #VendorScum.
- 2 minsThis post was previously hosted on a different site and then migrated here.
Let me be frank with you, I hate backup. Backup freaking sucks.
In 15 years of working in IT backup platforms are invariably the most painful part of any project. This is normally either because a) it’s an afterthought, or b) whatever product the customer has chosen to go with is a legacy piece of crap that’s overly complex and hasn’t seen any real innovation for 20 years.
I’ve worked on projects that have had 6 week timescales solely to implement the backup environment, and they still haven’t worked correctly after that because someone undersized a media agent, or there weren’t enough proxy servers, or whatever.
Why do I mention this now? As of March 1st I shall be joining Rubrik as their 3rd SE in the UK, nominally covering Western EMEA.
Rubrik appeals to me on many levels, but most importantly the way they’ve come to market with their product aligns 100% with how I feel backup should be. One of the analogies that I have used when talking to companies is this:
My house is more sophisticated from a backup and restore perspective than your datacentre. In this house I have 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, 4 Macs, all of which are backed up to both a NAS on premises, and offsite to the cloud. There’s no faffing around to configure anything, I manage it all from my iPhone, and I can restore to or from any device in seconds with minimal disruption.
This was the exact analogy that my new boss used to describe to me the simplicity of Rubrik’s approach, and at that point I was sold. I was already a fan of Rubrik, but to have my own analogy quoted back to me by leadership within the company hammered home that I was joining the right team.
Of course Rubrik doesn’t just do backup. It comes in a lovely scale-out appliance model, with full native S3 interfaces, an API first approach to ensure full automation capabilities and interoperability to any other RESTful API, SLA and policy based management of all protected entities, local restore/clone, and the analytics and visibility into your data to allow you full control over it - regardless of where it sits.
Did I mention there’s a VSA for your ROBO/Edge deployments? There is.
This is a true Cloud Data Management platform to deliver data protection, search, analytics, compliance, and copy data management across private and public clouds.
Suffice to say that I’m incredibly excited to begin this next chapter of my career, and incredibly excited to be joining Rubrik at a time where the whole datacentre is ripe for disruption.
I’ll leave you with a video covering off the product, and hopefully you’ll see why I’m so excited. If you would like more information reach out to me, or take a look at the series of videos from Tech Field Day.
Don’t backup, go forwards.