Businesses are working with a fragmented application landscape today. They are leaning on tried-and-true, traditional mainstays such as Oracle databases as well as on newer, modern workloads such as NoSQL databases and cloud-based productivity suites. The number and variety of applications IT must support is exploding. These applications must also be seamlessly mobile across on-premises infrastructure and cloud-delivered services, to meet cost, performance and other service level agreements (SLAs). Meanwhile, new and strict compliance regulations and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks influence how information is stored and shared across these applications. To serve this workload ecosystem IT requires a centralized, secure and agile data management fabric.
Rubrik Andes 5.0
The newest iteration of Rubrik’s core Cloud Data Management platform, Andes 5.0, centralizes automation, governance, and protection of mission-critical applications including Oracle databases, SAP HANA, MongoDB and Cassandra for hybrid cloud environments.
In addition to introducing a number of application-specific enhancements, the platform includes the new Elastic App Service. Elastic App Service is an intelligent data protection service for application-aware data reduction on-premises and in the cloud. Database administrators (DBAs) can continue using their preferred management tools while benefiting from Rubrik’s automated data lifecycle management and data immutability to achieve greater network and storage efficiencies while protecting against cyber attacks such as ransomware.
For Oracle databases, Rubrik Andes now brings fully automated backup, instant recovery and Live Mounts for a simplified user experience. Rubrik automatically discovers the Oracle environment, and an SLA can be assigned by the DBA or inherited from the Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) or host. If Oracle is down in production, the administrator can instantly recover because the Oracle data files are served directly from the scale-out, flash-optimized Rubrik cluster. While Oracle is being run from Rubrik and serving clients, the DBA can live migrate data from backup to production storage. Furthermore, Rubrik’s Live Mount capability enables customers to create unlimited number of zero overhead clones from any point in time. These clones can be used for Test/Dev, DevOps and ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) use cases.
Rubrik Andes 5.0 also integrates with native SAP tools including point-in-time recovery. These capabilities help to increase uptime for these mission-critical applications. For healthcare organizations navigating HIPAA compliance, Rubrik has brought the automation and immutability capabilities to EPIC Caché databases specifically.
The new platform brings a number of capabilities to data and databases stored in a hybrid cloud and also to those stored fully off-premises. For instance, Rubrik’s new NAS Direct Archive capability enables enterprises to efficiently store structured and unstructured data sets on-premises or in the cloud with features including search and recovery for single files, indexing, and metadata capture and orchestration. Meanwhile, integration with Datos IO technology that Rubrik acquired earlier in 2018 brings data management and protection to NoSQL databases (a deeper dive into Datos IO capabilities can be found in this Storage Switzerland briefing note). New improvements to Rubrik’s CloudOn services, which enable on-premises workloads to be instantiated in the cloud for disaster recovery and test and development, as well as the new Rubrik Accelerator for Microsoft Azure capability, which extends data protection and application migration and mobility to Microsoft Azure services, are also included.
The cloud story is continued through Rubrik’s Polaris platform, which brings policy-based search and restore to Microsoft Office 365 applications for greater simplicity and faster performance. Effectively, protection is scaled automatically as the business needs change. Furthermore, the organization can direct backups to specific cloud services.
StorageSwiss Take
The hybrid cloud is all about balancing agile scalability and portability, self-service, and governance, compliance and security. Rubrik’s Andes 5.0 stands to bring these capabilities to database administrators and other application owners – helping the business not only to get a stronger handle on the data that is spread out across applications and infrastructures but also to accelerate application development (which is increasingly critical to innovation). Automation has been extended to many more enterprise workloads with the new release, which can help to lower management overhead and also to speed time-to-recovery – but IT still has the option to regain control, for instance by overruling derived SLAs.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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