Rubrik Alta Cloud Data Management Platform Expanded For Both Legacy AIX/Solaris, Modern AWS Environments

Data protection and data management technology developer Rubrik on Wednesday updated its Alta cloud data management platform with Amazon Web Services EC2-native backup and modern data protection for legacy AIX and Solaris environments.

The updates, contained in the Rubrik Alta 4.2 release, expand on the hybrid cloud data protection strategy Rubrik has been developing for some time, said Chris Wahl, chief technologist for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.

"We are looking at how to develop every aspect of our hybrid cloud strategy in terms of what channel partners are doing, what MSPs are doing, and what customers are doing in backup and disaster recovery," Wahl told CRN. "We are tying all these areas together. There's no need for customers and partners to stitch the different parts together."

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The Rubrik Alta cloud data management platform is the company's flagship offering. It is a scale-out platform that delivers automated backup, recovery, archival, search, cloud, and development capabilities for hybrid cloud environments.

Alta 4.1, unveiled in September, added support for all Microsoft applications, support for Microsoft Azure Stack and CloudOn for Microsoft Azure, integration with Google Cloud Platform, and support for government infrastructure offerings from Amazon Web Services.

Rubrik Alta 4.2 adds new hybrid cloud capabilities, including changes in how it works with public clouds, legacy infrastructures and private clouds, Wahl said.

Topping the list of enhancements is the expansion of Alta 4.2 into AWS EC2-native backup and lifecycle management, especially the ability to apply policies to any EC2 instances, Wahl said.

"We will handle the entire lifecycle management, regardless of where the data is run," he said. "There's no more need for hack cron jobs (scheduled tasks at specified frequency). Cron jobs are basically asking engineers to write their own backup system. They don't need to."

The second big update is the ability to work in legacy AIX and Solaris environments, Wahl said.

"With hybrid clouds, you can't ignore what's on the floor," he said. "We now protect apps in those environments and unlock unique use cases. With Alta 4.2, customers can do things like add AWS policies to AIX and Solaris data, or migrate data from those legacy platforms to more modern systems."

The third is improved integration with VMware, especially with VMware vCloud Director, which enables cloud providers to provision software-defined data center services as complete virtual data centers.

"Prior to this, we provided integration with VMware vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator," Wahl said. "For MSPs looking at multi-tenancy compliance, vCloud Director lets them manage data as if they were public cloud providers."

Rubrik Alta has turned out to be a very good data management platform for clients, and version 4.2 is adding a lot of much needed management capabilities, said Ned Engelke, chief technology officer at Evotek, a San Diego-based solution provider and early adopter of Rubrik's technology.

Engelke told CRN the support for legacy AIX and Solaris environments is very important when working with enterprise clients, nearly all of whom are looking for a single management framework to leverage public cloud capabilities while not being locked into working with any particular cloud provider.

"AIX and Solaris are not going away," he said. "They just work. But customers want to index their AIX and Solaris data, archive it, and put it on public clouds. And once they do that, why not leverage that data to recover it after a failure or probe that data to find issues."

For any customer that has been around for some time, or who have scaled over the years, there is a lot of interest in managing the data in those old environments along with their modern applications, Engelke said.

"They have all that legacy stuff they need to deal with," he said. "At the same time, their new developers are moving to AWS. Customers are finding their content is now moving to the Web. They need a way to unify it all."

Rubrik Alta 4.2 is slated to enter general availability this summer, Wahl said.