Rubrik to hit enterprise with double whammy

Analysis Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha says there are two ways of looking at backup and recovery: loosely they are hardware or storage-centric and software-centric.

The hardware-centric view was centred on Data Domain. Its arrays were connected directly to data sources, such as databases, and took a data dump from them, deduplicating it and providing vastly faster restores than are available from tape libraries.

Sinha’s exemplar for the software-centric data management view is Veritas. It looked into the source database and generated a metadata account of it – a full catalogue. Then it collected data and sent it out to backends.

Rubrik, Sinha says, is re-inventing Veritas for the multi-cloud world: “We’re the reincarnation of Veritas.”

Companies coming from a storage view of the world are reinventing Data Domain for the modern era, and talking about secondary storage consolidation. He includes Actifio and Cohesity in this group.

We might also include Catalogic. Sinha says Data Domain and Cohesity just take a dump generated by a source database. Because they don’t generate metadata about data sources, then they don’t possess the granularity that Rubrik does.

Veeam is also in the data management software camp, and has found great success with small and medium enterprises. In many ways it is similar to Rubrik, but Sinha says it is focussed on small and medium enterprises while Rubrik is enterprise-focussed.

Commvault is a Rubrik precursor and built for the last generation of data centres – the pre-cloud era, Sinha says, and the Data Domains and Cohesitys sit behind Veeam and Commvault.

Datos IO is in the data management software camp. According to Sinha, it has focussed on the distributed database area, which is a tiny part of the market*. If it grows to an interesting and significant size, then Rubrik will extend its offering to cover it.

He says that if you want to be an enterprise data management company, you need a strong metadata platform. “We combined that with data definition and we have self-describing data. That’s our core innovation.” With it you can take data from one place and power it up elsewhere.

In the next three to five years, Sinha thinks, there will still be a storage-centric view versus a software data management view. But we’ll be in a multi-cloud world and in the cloud there is no storage.

The cloud gives you storage. What business customers will need is data management and the software data management view will, he implies, prevail. ®

* Updated at 1300 on Monday 2 Oct to add:

Peter Smails, Datos IO VP for marketing and business development, got in touch to tell us: "To say Datos IO is playing in a 'tiny' part of the market is simply incorrect. On the contrary, with the likes of Dell EMC, CommVault, and Veritas all investing and making noise in the space, it appears Rubrik is a laggard behind even the traditional vendors when it comes to data protection for non-relational and big data workloads. Look no further than Cloudera's IPO and MongoDB's recent IPO filing to see the market is most definitely here and now.

"Meanwhile, Datos IO momentum has never been stronger. We just announced that we attained AWS Advanced tier partner status in the APN, published a Maxwell Health case study (OpenTable is next), and we were recognized in two Gartner Hype Cycles for the second straight year. We also have a big launch coming that we can tell you more about in October."

We look forward to hearing more next month.