OpenStack has emerged as a cornerstone for organizations seeking scalable, flexible, and open-source cloud infrastructure. Its versatility makes it a compelling choice for building dynamic environments and driving application modernization.
However this dynamism, while empowering, also introduces unique and formidable challenges in data protection and cyber resilience. At Rubrik, we understand that securing modern cloud-native environments requires equally modern solutions. Following our recent announcement, we're excited to dive deeper into how Rubrik's native support for OpenStack can tackle these challenges head-on, helping your critical data stay protected, secure, and readily recoverable.
Challenges with OpenStack Data Protection
Legacy data protection solutions were typically designed for static, on-premises infrastructure. The expansive and dynamic nature of OpenStack environments—characterized by rapid VM provisioning, distributed components, and diverse workloads—often overwhelms traditional data protection mechanisms, which struggle to keep pace with the dynamic scalability and inherent complexity of OpenStack.
This disconnect leads to fragmented backup strategies, performance bottlenecks, and a significant challenge in maintaining consistent data protection policies and meeting compliance requirements across a flexible infrastructure.
Furthermore the increasing sophistication of cyber threats (particularly ransomware) demands immutable and air-gapped backups that legacy systems often cannot provide. This can leave critical OpenStack data vulnerable and make recovery cumbersome in the event of an incursion. This leads to inefficient data protection, poor recoverability, and ultimately, exposes organizations to business-crippling risks.
How Can Rubrik Help?
Rubrik's native support for OpenStack environments offers a modern, integrated, and secure approach to data protection. We've engineered our solution to match OpenStack's pace and scale, empowering organizations to accelerate their cloud transformation journey while enhancing cyber resilience.
Key aspects of Rubrik's differentiated solution and the benefits they provide include:
Unified Management: Rubrik offers a single, intuitive interface (Rubrik Security Cloud) to manage data protection across your entire hybrid environment, including OpenStack, other hypervisors (VMware, Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V, OpenShift Virtualization), databases, and SaaS applications. This centralizes visibility and control, simplifying operations, reducing management overhead, and allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Zero-Trust Data Security for enhanced Resilience: Rubrik's commitment to zero-trust data security is demonstrated in the features of our products. For example, immutable backups for OpenStack are tamper-resistant, so your backups remain unalterable and secure, even if an attacker compromises your production environment. Also, multi-factor authentication (MFA) secures access to OpenStack backup and recovery operations, adding a crucial layer against unauthorized intrusions.
Granular role-based access control (RBAC) for OpenStack backup workflows ensures users have only the access necessary to do their jobs. These features are scalable, extending seamlessly across multiple OpenStack environments, allowing you to confidently adopt OpenStack without compromising security.
Policy-Driven Automation for Consistent Protection: Define your Service Level Agreement (SLA) policies once and Rubrik automatically applies them. New OpenStack VMs are automatically discovered and protected according to your defined policies, providing comprehensive coverage without manual intervention. This eliminates manual oversight and human error, maintaining consistent SLA compliance.
Optimized Performance and Accelerated Backup/Access: Rubrik leverages incremental-forever backups tailored for OpenStack resources, minimizing backup windows and network impact, while providing application-consistent snapshots to preserve data integrity. This leads to lower Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and faster data access when you need it most, allowing rapid business continuity.
Flexible and Precise Recovery for Minimal Downtime: Rubik helps you gain granular control over your recovery process with flexible options, including exports of snapshots, file-level restorations, and cross-environment recovery for testing or disaster recovery scenarios. This minimizes downtime by allowing you to restore exactly what you need—be it an entire VM, a specific file, or a database—quickly and efficiently.
By embracing Rubrik, organizations can confidently modernize their infrastructure, knowing their OpenStack environments are secured by a solution built for today's dynamic cloud realities and tomorrow's cyber threats.
How It Works
Rubrik's data protection for OpenStack leverages a proxy VM running within the OpenStack environment to efficiently back up VM volumes via Cinder snapshots. This approach uses the Rubrik Backup Agent within the proxy VM to identify and transfer only changed blocks to Rubrik Secure Vault, providing efficient incremental backups without relying on any single storage provider.
Policy-Driven Protection:
Additionally, service level agreement (SLA) assignment within Rubrik for OpenStack environments adheres to a clear hierarchy, enabling flexible protection without the need for managing individual policies for every VM. Policies can be applied at the OpenStack region level, the availability zone level, or applied directly to individual VMs, with the lowest level assignment taking the highest precedence. This provides consistent and adaptable data protection across your entire infrastructure.
Here’s how the Rubrik for OpenStack backup process works::
An SLA Domain is associated with the Instance (VM), either directly or derived from a higher level object.
Rubrik initiates a request to Cinder to create a snapshot of each of the volumes attached to the VM.
Rubrik makes a request to Nova to retrieve VM metadata.
These volume snapshots are then mounted to the Rubrik Proxy VM.
The Rubrik Backup Agent residing in the Proxy VM, efficiently identifies the changed blocks by comparing the new volume snapshot to the previous backup and securely transfers to Rubrik Secure Vault, providing highly efficient incremental backups.
The Recovery Process:
For recovery, Rubrik offers granular options, allowing users to download individual files and folders or to perform an export to either the original or a different availability zone.
Rubrik initiates a request to Cinder to create a new volume.
This newly created volume is mounted to the Rubrik Proxy VM.
The Rubrik Backup Agent in the Proxy VM retrieves the requested data from Rubrik Secure Vault and writes it to the new volume.
Rubrik then makes a request to Nova to create a new VM using the configuration details captured from the original VM’s metadata.
Finally, the restored volume is detached from the Proxy VM and attached to the new VM, completing the recovery process.
Rubrik's comprehensive data protection platform for OpenStack environments is designed to meet the demands of the modern, dynamic cloud landscape. By providing zero-trust data security, automated protection, accelerated backups, and granular recovery options, Rubrik empowers IT teams to confidently manage backup and recovery operations, reduce downtime, simplify management tasks, and enhance data accessibility.
Ready to bolster your OpenStack data protection strategy? Visit our OpenStack solution page to learn more about Rubrik's robust capabilities.
RUBRIK SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT: Any unreleased services or features referenced in this document are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in our sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of Rubrik, Inc. and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.