As Pure//Accelerate approaches, one of my favorite aspects of winning solutions comes to mind. It’s a virtue that transforms products into MVPs, rather than the drama generators so common on the court and in the field. What is it?

Simplicity

Businesses have enough knobs and pain points with tier-1 Oracle/SAP deployments and SQL, SharePoint and Exchange farms. The last thing they need is for storage and data protection to jump on the pile. That’s why enterprises need Pure Storage and Rubrik.

From the ground up, Pure and Rubrik have simplicity in their DNA. If you have a FlashArray on the floor, then you already know the freedom and ease it brings to storage infrastructure. Gone are the days of tweaking with RAID sets or tuning LUNs to squeeze out a few performance points. With a few cables and a vSphere plugin, Pure serves up datastores and gets out of the way.

Rubrik brings the same unobtrusive value to data protection and is the perfect pairing to Pure. From rack & go to policy-driven automation to instant recovery, Rubrik drives straight to the point and with beautiful simplicity.Rack & Go

Rack & Go

The first thing that stands out with Rubrik is its lean footprint–it doesn’t eat up precious data center space. When we deployed Rubrik at ExponentHR, we shrunk our backup layout from 14RU at each data center to just 4RU, with an even greater reduction in power consumption and cabling complexity.

With the previous product, the physical installation wasn’t easy, but it paled in comparison to the configuration and learning curve challenges. In contrast, the entire Rubrik deployment took 90 minutes to install and configure at both sites, including drive time. Starting the engine was as easy as a set of vCenter credentials.

Policy-Driven Automation

The heart of Rubrik is its SLA-based policy engine. What used to be isolated jobs and schedules for backup, replication, and archive becomes a single, congruent SLA in Rubrik. Do you know how often you want to take backups? And how long you want to keep them? Then you have everything you need to start protecting your VMs.

 

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Have you considered replication and archive? In my past experience, replication involved once-a-day jobs that weren’t aware of the backups they shipped. Some days everything was ready and arrived at the other side together. On others, jobs still in progress were left behind because they weren’t finished when the bus left. That meant our RPOs unreliably wavered from 3 hours (best case) to 48 hours, depending on when a disaster occurred.

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With Rubrik, the same policy that drives backups also manages replication (and archive) and intelligently pairs them. As I wrote about in November, Rubrik cluster partners watch for new backups and pull them over shortly after they complete. With a typical “Gold” SLA with backups every 4 hours, RPOs are now accelerated to a best case of 21 minutes and a worst of 4 hours and 21 minutes. That’s a 9x+ improvement on RPOs.

Instant Recovery

Tight RPOs are important, but it’s the RTO that makes the rubber meet the road. Let’s assume I could guarantee the best-case, 3-hour RPO on my old solution. That might sound good until you hear that the restore jobs added an 8-hour RTO, and they didn’t always succeed. And those jobs? They required hundreds of clicks and upwards of an hour just to queue them.

This is where Rubrik Live Mount shines. How does a 2-minute RTO sound? Too good to be true? That’s what I thought. Then I saw it in action and used it in production. Recovery has never been so simple.

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Live Mount redefines recovery by registering VMs with vCenter/ESXi and booting them from Rubrik’s flash-empowered storage. In a couple minutes and a few clicks (or API calls), VMs can be up and performing business-critical functions at up to 30K IOPS per brik. Then, when it is convenient, the 300K IOPS of Pure’s FlashArray //m are just a storage vMotion away.

It’s Simple

If you’re looking for the perfect platform to accelerate and protect tier-1 applications, while freeing IT to add value to the business, Pure Storage and Rubrik are an unstoppable solution.

Interested in learning more? Visit our booth at Pure//Accelerate 2016. I’ll also be presenting A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Next-Gen Flash & Data Protection without the Complexity at 11 am on Tuesday, March 15. As an added bonus, we’ll share a tech preview of what’s coming later this year. 😉