Converged Data Management is built upon five significant features, one of which is the concept of an API-Driven Architecture. I’m a firm believer that open and published APIs will rule the world, seeing as how they enable the ecosystem at large to extract enhanced value from a solution. With Rubrik, it means that data residing within the r300 Hybrid Cloud Appliance or the public and private archive can be further leveraged to bring about incredibly useful answers to irritating enterprise challenges.

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But don’t take my word for it. Two senior architects at AHEAD – a consulting practice in Chicago that focuses on hybrid cloud, data center infrastructure, and enterprise service management – have created something rather unique in a very short time span. They have crafted an open source vRealize Orchestrator plugin for Rubrik Converged Data Management using our 1.0 release APIs. Nick Colyer and Eric Shanks, the dynamic duo responsible for this snazzy contribution to the community, are writing a series of blog posts that discuss vRealize Orchestrator, RESTful APIs, and how they went about creating the code. Kudos, gentlemen!

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO, formerly vCenter Orchestrator) is an important part of the vSphere equation and doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves. It’s a free workflow orchestration engine that is included with vCenter Server, but can also be deployed on a standalone server or as a virtual appliance. As VMware adds further integration points between its hybrid cloud management platform – vRealize Automation (vRA) –  the need for vRO to build in workflows for cloud blueprints becomes critical. With Rubrik’s published and easily accessible APIs, the team at AHEAD were able to quickly design and plan out the necessary workflows and then deploy them into their lab for test and acceptance.

If you’d like to take part in the Rubrik plugin project that the AHEAD team has open sourced, head on over to FlowGrab and roll up your sleeves!