Rubrik Lands $41M Funding, Looks To Simplify Data Protection

Startup data protection software developer Rubrik on Tuesday unveiled a huge round of funding and released its first appliance it said makes it easy for customers to quickly take advantage of a scalable hybrid cloud model for backing up and recovering data.

Rubrik has closed a Series B round of funding worth $41 million only three months after coming out of stealth mode and unveiling its first funding round of $10 million. Among the participants in both rounds are several familiar names in the IT industry, said CEO Bipul Sinha.

These include John Thompson, Microsoft chairman and former CEO of Symantec; Frank Slootman, CEO of ServiceNow and former Data Domain CEO; Mark Leslie, former CEO of Veritas; and Dheeraj Pandey, founder and CEO of Nutanix.

[Related: Rubrik Exits Stealth With $10M And Plans To Simplify Data Protection]

The company also unveiled the new Rubrik r300, a hardware appliance that ties the company's data protection software with an industry-standard server to offer a scale-out solution for keeping a company up and running in case of a loss of data, Sinha told CRN.

Rubrik, which depends on channel partners -- including more than two dozen in North America so far -- for 100 percent of its sales, is unique in the simplicity it offers partners and customers, Sinha said.

"People today are buying backup software from companies like CommVault or Avamar, and servers from Dell and others, and backup infrastructure from companies like Data Domain," he said. "We combine all that into a single piece of software that runs on commodity hardware. Customers get simplicity. They buy the software and plug it in, and within 15 minutes they're doing backups."

It takes longer to rack and stack the Rubrik r300 than it does to actually start taking snapshots or doing other storage functions with it, Sinha said.

The appliances are sold with a minimum of three nodes in a cluster with no single point of failure, but customers can add up to tens of thousands of nodes, he said.

"We're bringing Apple-like simplicity to IT with Google-like web-scale IT," he said. "Our goal is to completely overhaul the backup infrastructure."

Sinha admitted the largest deployment so far as been with a total of 40 nodes. "We're a small company," he said. "That's a lot of hardware to buy. So we are money-constrained, not technology-constrained."

Rubrik has made data protection simple by combining its software with hardware into a single appliance and building in scale-out capacity, said Nathan Reynolds, executive vice president and co-founder of Clearpath Solutions Group, a Herndon, Va.-based solution provider and Rubrik channel partner.

Reynolds told CRN that the Rubrik solution, which his company is currently testing, provides a simple way to work with customers whose data protection requirements have grown beyond the ability of what such vendors as Veeam provide.

"We do great business with Veeam, and have had success," he said. "But we've seen scalability limit as we get into larger environments. We like Veeam. But the two are not aimed at the same markets. Rubrik solutions run about $60,000 to $70,000, while Veeam is in the single-digit thousands of dollars."

Reynolds said Clearpath Solutions Group took a chance on working with Rubrik in its early days, in part, because of the high-caliber investors the vendor has and especially because of it scalability potentials.

"Web-scale architecture is taking off like wildfire," he said. "Just look at what's happening with Nutanix, SimpliVity and VMware's EVO: Rail. These are all simple solutions that are very easy to scale. Any time you can bring something into the data center that's easy to manage, that supports a customer's mission, and that can give back a few hours to an administrator's day, we see this as having potential."

The Rubrik r300 comes in two models, Sinha said. The r330 is a 2U chassis with three hardware nodes built inside to support up to 200 virtual machines. The r340 is similar, but has four hardware nodes inside to support up to 300 virtual machines. Both have flash-optimized storage, he said.

The software in the r300 is based on Rubrik's own file system that uses both flash and disk-based storage to do globally compressed and deduplicated backups, he said. List price starts at under $100,000 for the r330, including all the software capabilities, he said.

PUBLISHED MAY 26, 2015