At Rubrik, we’re constantly pushing ourselves to innovate and build the most comprehensive cloud data management (CDM) solution on the market. Our ultimate goal is to help enterprises realize their business vision with continuous access to, protection of, and power from their data—regardless of where that data resides. When speaking with our customers, we’ve come to realize that their primary goals—and challenges—can be bucketed into three categories:
Modernize and automate backup and recovery
Extend to the cloud
Mitigate data risk
Today, we’re thrilled to announce Rubrik Andes 5.3, which introduces new enhancements and features designed to support customers in these three actions. This blog post will dive into the first pillar—modernize and automate—and is the first of an in-depth series covering our newest features.
Modernization and automation have always been at the core of Rubrik’s design, providing a gateway into blazingly fast performance and intelligent operations. Rubrik Andes 5.3 builds on top of this design pillar, bringing with it many enhancements to help customers gain more scale and performance, all without sacrificing the operational simplicities of the Rubrik platform. Let’s explore some of the latest features and the impact they have on our customers.
Performance at Enterprise Scale
One of the things that makes Rubrik unique is the ability to quickly restore soaring volumes of data. Andes 5.3 brings even more performance enhancements as we continue to raise the bar on database and NAS support.
SQL Performance
Previously, Rubrik supported SQL backup through only Microsoft’s VSS technology, which required certain commands to be executed for every database or group of databases being backed up on a SQL host. Andes 5.3 introduces Rubrik SQL Writer service, which leverages VDI commands alongside VSS technology, drastically reducing the number of expensive VSS commands required. For customers that run SQL hosts containing 100s or 1000s of databases, this new approach unlocks up to 10x the performance during backup events.
But we didn’t stop at just SQL performance. Through tunable control, customers are able to now perform up to 2.5 more SQL log backup jobs on a single Rubrik four-node cluster, allowing them to process even more SQL backups on their existing Rubrik footprint.
Oracle Performance
Earlier this year, Rubrik Andes 5.2 completely changed the game for Oracle backup performance, and now we are doubling down on that with up to a 2x performance improvement (nearly one gigabyte per second) to our full Oracle database backups. This is accomplished by parallelizing the Oracle backup file conversion process and optimizing the NFS data transfer. Additionally, log backups also get a performance boost by leveraging RMAN backup sets. Stay tuned for a deep dive into these and other Oracle enhancements in an upcoming blog.
NAS Performance
Andes 5.3 brings significant improvements to both the NetApp SnapDiff scans and fileset restores for efficient management of large-scale NAS environments. Customers can cut the time it takes to scan a filer in half, shrinking their overall backup time to meet aggressive backup windows. In a similar vein, customers are able to quickly restore millions of files on both NFS and SMB. For instance, 10 million, 100 KB files now take less than 1 hour to restore over NFS.
Intelligent Operations
At Rubrik, we thrive on making customers’ lives easier by drastically reducing data management complexity. For instance, we’ve consolidated the need to create and manage hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs with our SLA Policy automation. Andes 5.3 extends this trend by automating a number of operations that were once a manual process.
SLA Managed Volumes
Customers leverage the Rubrik Elastic App Service, also known as Managed Volumes, technology to backup everything using homegrown scripts. Andes 5.3 introduces a new concept called SLA Managed Volumes. With an SLA Managed Volume, Rubrik automates the complete process of beginning and ending snapshots, as well as the script definition, which can be simply assigned to an SLA Domain. This provides many operational efficiencies, such as reducing the need for floating IPs, deploying curl on the hosts, cumbersome tasks around managing mounts on the hosts, and modifying backup scripts to include calls to begin and end snapshot APIs. SLA Managed Volumes also increases the number of supported Managed Volumes up to 4x and provides more visibility into backup failures directly from the Rubrik user interface.
Upgrade Improvements
Starting with Andes 5.3, customers will see improvements to our upgrade processes. First, CDM cluster upgrades can now be performed directly from the Rubrik Polaris dashboard. A new CDM upgrades section allows customers to quickly view all of their Rubrik Clusters, along with information around upgrade recommendations, based on available stable and compatible versions. Without leaving Rubrik Polaris, customers can trigger and schedule upgrades, run periodic pre-checks, and monitor upgrade statuses. In addition, users can now pre-stage upgrades prior to the upgrade process, drastically cutting down upgrade time.
Recovery Validation and Backup Verification
Andes 5.3 also provides a strong focus on ensuring customers are able to restore successfully. While backups are important, the ability to restore those backups when you need to is perhaps even more crucial. First, we’ve added full recovery validation for Oracle backups, which enables customers to validate their Oracle backups from any point in time to ensure recoverability. Oracle Recovery Validation leverages our existing Live Mount technology to create a point-in-time copy of the database, at which point a validation job is automatically triggered to ensure your database, log, and control file backups are able to be successfully restored.
Aside from Oracle, Andes 5.3 also introduces a new Backup Verification API to verify any workload backup stored within the Rubrik platform. This verification audit validates the complete fingerprint for a snapshot, ensuring that customers are able to comply with data assurance requirements, and improve their data recoverability posture overall. Using this API, customers have yet another option to automate a process that could give them back precious time and reduce the risk of human error.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Rubrik Andes 5.3 offers customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation and unlock as much value as possible from their backup data. Get a deeper understanding of these features and more by watching the Rubrik Winter Release on-demand.