NetApp Rubrik Partnership: Ensuring Next-Gen Data Management

With advancements in technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), a large amount of data is generated every day. According to Statista, global data creation due to digital transformation is projected to grow more than 180 zettabytes by 2025.

Due to the rapid data growth, businesses require a complex infrastructure to backup and recover the data while ensuring compliance. With the advent of the cloud, this has become easier for organizations as they use services hosted by the public cloud vendors to reduce the burden on their IT teams. Vendors and businesses that handle the management of public cloud can focus on other important tasks.

However, companies face significant challenges in optimizing cost and performance at a high scale while implementing multi-cloud solutions. To improve data management and cloud capabilities, Rubrik extended its partnership with NetApp this year. Both the US-based companies focus on cloud data management and other related services.

About Rubrik NetApp Partnership

Rubrik NetApp partnership began in 2019 when the two companies announced their first joint solution to simplify data lifecycle management from backup to recovery at cloud.

The solution combines Rubrik’s cloud data management platform with NetApp’s StoragGRID. Rubrik’s control plane enables automated data lifecycle management, and StorageGRID is used as an object-based storage/ archive target.

Rubrik cloud data management with NetApp’s ONTAP software offers deeper cloud integration and continuous data availability for mission-critical enterprise applications.

In addition, these companies integrated NetApp’s proprietary SnapDiff API with Rubrik’s platform. SnapDiff is an architecture for backing up NAS data to on-premises and cloud object storage.

Now, the expanded partnership aims to offer closer product integration. For example, Rubrik’s highly secure cloud data management platform is now available on NetApp’s Global Price List (GPL).

In addition, NetApp will resell Rubrik products like Rubrik Go Business Edition and Rubrik Go Foundation edition, thereby boosting sales.

The goal is to ease the transition of businesses to the cloud by providing high-density and cost-efficient object storage while ensuring security, data protection, compliance, and governance.

In addition, with their data management tools across a data fabric, management and recovery become easier no matter where the workloads are deployed, and data is stored. This ensures quick ROI on hybrid cloud implementation.

How Does Rubrik & NetApp Partnership Work?

The solution protects, automates, and secures applications across data centers and clouds. Both Rubrik and StorageGRID index file metadata for worldwide file-level search to have instant access to large amounts of unstructured data.

Rubrik’s platform combines backup software, replication, catalog management, and deduplicated storage into a single scalable appliance.

This makes it simple and quick for users to locate and restore virtual machines (VMs), files, databases, and so on across public or private clouds. In addition, Rubrik and NetApp partnership helps businesses in the following ways.

Single SLA Policy Engine
The solution delivers policy-based automation (SLA and ILM) to ease different aspects of data management for users. This eliminates manual backup & job scheduling, optimizes cost, and ensures compliance.

Single SLA Policy Engine by Rubrik automates processes like backup, archival, and replication for physical, virtual, and cloud workloads. You have to only specify the backup frequency and retention policies.
Cloud-Scale Architecture
The solution enables simple, linear-scale architecture for businesses to grow. However, scaling Rubrik and StorageGRID capabilities requires the addition of more nodes to each environment.

It enables businesses to handle rapid data growth while avoiding forklift upgrades. Hence, they can easily scale and satisfy long retention requirements for critical business data.
Vendor-Agnostic Software Platform
Rubrik has vendor-agnostic software fabric to help avoid vendor lock-in for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Additionally, with its NAS (network-attached storage) direct archive, it is easy to migrate data to any public or private cloud – including NetApp StorageGRID and ONTAP NAS environments.

StorageGRID supports open APIs like Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift, which allows users to manage data across hybrid cloud architectures without the vendor lock-in.

In addition, NetApp’s RESTful APIs allow customers to reduce the impact on the production environment while ensuring faster incremental backups.

Challenges That Enterprises Can Overcome with NetApp Rubrik Partnership

The solution provided by NetApp Rubrik Partnership for backup and recovery is much simpler than other industry solutions.

Slow backup and negative impact on app performance
Database administrators have to spend a lot of time on database replication and backups. Businesses also require additional backups and validation on the backups.

With NetApp Rubrik Partnership, businesses can save time managing backups and minimize the negative impact on performance.
Slow recovery time
Slower recovery time can have a drastic impact on mission-critical situations like stock trading. Even an outage lasting a few seconds can incur huge losses for the organization.

If the backup solution is unreliable and difficult to manage, it can take days for businesses to go back to being fully functional. NetApp Rubrik partnership addresses this issue.
Poor visibility
Poor visibility of on-prem and cloud data is a potential threat when data is generated at exponential volumes that can slow digital initiatives, increase security risks, and lead to regulatory penalties. The joint solution enables file-level access and provides in-built reporting.
Built for tape
Archiving to tape is an unavoidable legal/ compliance requirement for many industries in various countries. While tape support is available in the market, the presence of multiple tape libraries, drives, and related drivers can be confusing. NetApp-Rubrik solution can prevent this complexity.

Key Benefits of Combined Data Management Capabilities by Rubrik & NetApp

This partnership enables users to adjust their object policies and use their data to fulfill the business and data requirements regarding protection, performance, cost, and location.

Quick setup and immediate file-level access

Rubrik NetApp joint solution also provides file-level search against massive quantities of unstructured data stored in StorageGRID. It performs the predictive search to quickly locate files, VMs, and databases on-premises and in the cloud.

In addition, you can auto-discover the NAS shares that need protection. This helps decrease costs as recoveries get faster and more granular down to the file level.

Get better backup speed load reduction on NetApp filers

There is no need to scan files during incremental backup, which reduces the processing time. The native RESTful API also decreases the impact on the production environment. You can deliver 10x reduced impact on NetApp arrays, compress backup windows, and provide instant recovery.

Near-zero RTO (recovery time objective) and fast backup performance

Rubrik ensures parallel ingest (for SLA) and incremental-forever backups to focus only on changed data blocks at scale. Rubrik’s Live Mount enables users to deliver near-zero RTOs for mission-critical databases and VMs.

Automated cloud archival

Rubrik enables businesses to eliminate NDMP (network data management protocol) related tape complexity with data archival to any destination – from public cloud to NFS (network file system) or StorageGRID. This enables faster recoveries from cost-effective and scalable archive storage tiers.

Multi-cloud mobility

There is no need for vendor lock-in. Instead, go with the cloud of your choice and get instant archival, test/dev, and DR due to intelligent integration with NetApp’s RESTful APIs.

Savings and possibilities

There is no need to manage backups with the SLA policy engine, and you can achieve up to 80-90 percent operational savings. You can also use the backup functionality to recover from ransomware or support data governance and compliance.

Conclusion

NetApp is Rubrik’s most strategic storage partner compared to Pure Storage, Nutanix, Cloudian, and other storage vendors. As a result, NetApp and Rubrik partnership benefits not only them but also the customers and partners.

Also, new businesses looking for a next-generation data management solution can use the services made available because of this partnership to their advantage.