Today Rubrik announced the release of their latest version of the Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) operating system and this one has some really neat enhancements. If you’re not familiar with Rubrik, and hate managing backups, then you really should take a closer look at them. Their Cloud Data Management Platform makes managing backups a very simple task. Think Apple’s Time Machine, only for your data center.

The latest version of their operating system is named “Firefly”, instead of having a boring old number distinction like 2.0. I’m told that future versions will also be named in a similar fashion around a bio-luminescence naming scheme. So if you’re not into fireflies, just hang tight for the Angler fish version which I’m speculating will be next.

A highlight of some of the features in the new release include:

• Additional Archive Backup Targets
• Erasure Coding
• Physical Backup Targets
• Edge Virtual Appliances

Additional Archive Backup Targets

If you’re familiar with Rubrik already, you’ll know that you can have your backups “age out” and be moved to an object based storage platform such as Amazon S3, or your own on-premises object storage target. In the latest release, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is now an option for archival as well. This should really make those companies with Microsoft ELAs that have Azure credits burning a whole in their pocket, very happy.

Erasure Coding

RAID is so last year at this point. All the cool kids are using erasure coding to ensure data durability. Rubrik is no exception and has moved towards erasure coding to ensure that failed disks do not compromise the data which is stored on them. The best thing about the switch to erasure coding is that now the “brik” can store twice as much data with the exact same hardware. Instead of having two data blocks out of six being data (four for parity), erasure coding means that four data blocks out of six can be data, and the other two are erasure codes. Thus the doubling of capacity. This also should increase performance since more data will be pushed to disk during a write operation.

Physical Backup Sources

One of the main reasons I heard customers pass on Rubrik in the past was that it would only backup vSphere virtual machines. Well, as expected, this is changing as well. In the latest Firefly version, Rubrik will now allow you to backup both physical Linux servers as well as SQL Server. Linux can be setup to backup a file set through a template. For instance, you can set a template that only backs up “/home”, or a partition, or whatever you can think of. For SQL Server, Rubrik can set a policy to backup the data and logs.

Edge Virtual Appliance

We need backups across all of our sites, but some of those sites are really small and may have a tiny infrastructure footprint. It would be a shame to need to add a whole 2U appliance to the site just to backup a couple of machines. Rubrik is introducing a virtual appliance to maintain backups in those small and remote offices. This is an OVA that can be deployed on your existing disks and the virtual appliance can replicate back to your own Rubrik physical appliance or archive to object storage, much like a physical brik. If you’ve got a home lab setup, I would keep an eye on this one!