Rubrik announces version 3.1. It's a new feature bonanza.

- 4 mins

This post was previously hosted on a different site and then migrated here.

As of 1pm GMT today, Rubrik announced version 3.1 of their codebase, bringing with it several new awesome features, and continuing their fast paced level of innovation and growth since they came out of stealth in 2015.

First up on the new features is Rubrik Envision.

Rubrik Envision Image

Envision is an enhancement to the reporting functionality within Rubrik, allowing for custom reporting. A summary of functionality is detailed below:

This is all fine and dandy, but my favourite element is that the reports are designed to be useful to multiple roles within your organisatiion. Admins, Managers, and Auditors are all included, and multiple scenarios are supported out of the box, such as:

Windows Server Protection

In addition to the existing support for VMware VMs and Linux, support has been expanded to include Windows server. This supports granula file and folder backups within Windows via Filesets. Filesets are “a logical construct based on Includes and Excludes”, and can either follow a direct path to a file or folder, or be specifically configured to follow a UNC path.

For example, you might backup C:\Users on all Windows servers on a daily basis excluding .mp3 files. At the same time, you might backup other folders on the same servers on a weekly or hourly basis.

Filesets

All Windows backups are indexed and searchable in the same way as VM and Linux backups.

Software Encryption at Rest

Encrypt all the things!

Although encryption at rest was already supported via Self Encrypting Drives, but as of v3.1 encryption at rest is now available via a Trusted Platform Module. This enables encryption to be available on a 1 brik cluster, as opposed to the previous 2 brik requirement for hardware encryption.

Encryption is focused on two components:

  1. Rubrik’s Atlas file system which holds backup data and indices
  2. Metadata - internal database, logs, statistics, etc.

Atlas is protected via AES-256 for all file writes. Specific encryption modes are used to match various data types - one method for short-term data such as initial ingest and another mode for long-term data. This additionally allows detection of tampering if backup data is modified even when the system is powered off.

Metadata is also protected via AES-256 level encryption and a method targeted to the metadata format.

The solution can “theoretically scale to 32 Exabytes within a single cluster”.

Other Notable Additions

If that wasn’t enough to get you going, here’s a few other additions squeezed into this release…

Linux and Windows UI Enhancements

UI has been made more “host centric”, with a dedicated page per host showing the filesets associated to that host.

SQL Server enhancements

Additional support for the following:

SQL

Customer Driven Upgrades

New ability to do self service updates. Upload the package to the cluster and job done.

vCentre Enhancements

You can now manually refresh the vCentre, if you’re too impatient to wait for the timed refresh, and you can now restore VMs without vCentre, if required.

vSphere 6.5 is now officially supported, too.

Edge Improvements

You can now add capacity to a running Edge instance.

In-place file restore into a Linux VM

Restore a file or folder directly back to a source VM with relevant permissions. The restore can overwrite existing files/folders or go to a separate folder on the source VM.

For a minor release (at least as far as version numbers go), that’s quite the list of features. I’m personally looking forward to getting some hands on and seeing what improvements have been made to the API under the hood.

Ed Morgan

Ed Morgan

GTM Technical Lead @ Rubrik, I like the Cloud, automation, and picking heavy things up then putting them down again.

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