There’s no denying that the role of backup data has shifted over the years. Whether it’s ensuring business continuity, increasing ransomware resiliency, supporting compliance, accelerating test/dev initiatives, or something else (the list goes on), the right data management solution can provide enterprises a significant advantage in the market.  

What does the right data management solution look like? In my experience speaking to countless IT leaders and customers, one thing is clear: companies need a way to untie their data from any commodity infrastructure--on-prem and in the cloud--and truly control it, irrespective of its magnitude or location. 

Every industry and organization is dealing with data explosion, which comes with a unique set of challenges for IT teams. This becomes even more true as the sheer amount of data continues to grow. As our CEO Bipul Sinha put it during FORWARD Digital Summit: “data is eating the world.” (You can learn more in his keynote, now on-demand). Predictions suggest that in 10 years, 50 billion connected devices will generate over 175 zettabytes of data. 

Quoting the Data Gravity concept here, if you consider data as an extremely large object, like a planet, as it gains mass (data growth), more service and applications are "attracted" to this data--just like gravity acts towards objects around a planet. The more mass (data growth), the stronger becomes the "gravitational pull." The side effect that Data Gravity brings is that if you decide to move that data, it becomes extremely hard since it is tied to its current location, something we call the data escape velocity.

In a nutshell: rapid data growth can also lead to more applications, more services, and, well, more complexity when moving the data.

Web-scale becomes a very elegant approach to address these concerns, as it’s all about seamlessly scaling at unheard-of levels. Gartner describes “web-scale IT” as a set of best practices and principles that “[deliver] the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting by rethinking positions across several dimensions.” It touches scalability, availability--and a true collaborative and learning approach. 

While scale is mission-critical, in reality, many old-school technologies aren’t built for it. These solutions are made up of multiple components that barely have an awareness of each other. This leads to single points of failures, service disruption, performance bottlenecks, different management interfaces, and a lot of babysitting...just to quote a few issues. These legacy options constrain your largest data footprint to something that could be easily replaced by a commodity product. On top of that, they lack mobility and flexibility and are basically full-time jobs to just monitor--a costly dilemma that only gets worse with scale. 

Back in 2016, Gartner estimated that 40% of the global enterprise companies would start embracing some web-scale in their practices. Rubrik was built with these challenges in mind with a web-scale architecture.  

Let's walk through how Rubrik puts into practice web-scale principles through a scale-out design. Rubrik is designed to enable high-availability across all layers in a single software fabric that leverages only commodity hardware. We expose clean and simple interfaces. 

By being born in the cloud era, we mastered how to properly make use of the cloud with the right economics. This means that Rubrik determines the best proper cloud dynamics and resources comprehension through ephemeral compute allocation and an incremental-forever approach. In addition, Rubrik delivers efficient restores by only retrieving what changed to minimize egress costs and align with RTO and RPO objectives. 

Rubrik’s approach is especially important if we go back to the Data Gravity concept and the importance of being able to quickly, and efficiently, move your data (whether that’s to another data center, ROBO environment, or the cloud). Doing this with legacy solutions can get clunky--and expensive--very fast. Rubrik combines a web-scale design with a Control Plane to provide you massive scale with a minimal data center footprint.

This is one of the reasons customers see massive TCO savings when switching to Rubrik. Rubrik’s innovative approach drives infinite scale while keeping a minimal footprint for meeting your RTOs and RPOs while supporting every stage of your cloud journey.

Data is only going to continue to grow--in volume and value. That’s why we are firm believers in building a solution that can help you solve the challenges of today while preparing you for the challenges of tomorrow. And web-scale design is just one way in which we do that. We welcome you on this journey with us to transform the way data is managed within your organization.

Want to learn more? Reach out for a demo!