Today, my team at Rubrik is pretty stoked to announce the release of version 2.0 of Rubrik Converged Data Management (PR). For those playing the at-home game, you might recall that Rubrik went Generally Available (GA) with version 1.0 back in May of this year. Not three months later, we’ve already put together a ridiculous amount of new features. These aren’t minor tweaks, either.

At a high level, you’re looking at the following:

• Native, Unlimited Replication – You can now point one Rubrik fabric at another one, across the WAN, and set replication requirements within an SLA Domain. This can be constrained to any quantity of days for which the SLA is set to exist, and Rubrik will replicate any backups created for virtual machines in that SLA Domain. There are no limits on the amount of backups that will be replicated.
• Beefier Appliances – Our initial offering, the r340, used 4 TB drives. Today, we’re releasing the r348, which uses 8 TB drives. This equals double the capacity within the same 2U form factor. The engineering team has also made some serious performance tweaks to data ingest rates and cloud archival throughput.
• Private Cloud Archive – While Amazon S3 makes a great public cloud archive target for long lived backups, we also heard that folks wanted a private cloud option. Really happy to reveal that version 2.0 of Rubrik Converged Data Management supports OpenStack Swift.
• Other Goodies – Active Directory integration, application aware backups, detailed reporting, capacity planning, SLA compliance validation, and so much more.

I won’t drone on further – 2.0 is pretty slick, and I’d suggest that you check out blog posts from the technical community (I’ll add links as I find them).

• Adam Armstrong (Storage Review): Rubrik Introduces New Hybrid Cloud Appliance with Unlimited Replication for Disaster Recovery
• Duncan Epping (Yellow-Bricks): Rubrik 2.0 release announced today
• Cormac Hogan: Rubrik 2.0 is out, with a new model and a new service
• Anthony Spiteri (Virtualization is Life): Rubrik – Converged Data Management 2.0 Announcement
• Amy Manley (Virtual Chick): Rubrik’s Converged Data Management 2.0 with Riker Beard enhancements
• Brian Suhr (VirtualizeTips): Rubrik reaches version 2.0 in a few short months
• Vladan (ESX Virtualization): Rubrik Data Management – New Aproach For VMware Backups?

Deep Dive Session

If you’re headed to VMworld and want to go deeper on Rubrik, come to the Rubrik VMworld session and win a pile of LEGO kits. But you’d better register quickly, because Nitro is trying to steal my favorite LEGO set!

Community PowerShell Module

Last, but not least, let’s get nerdy over PowerShell. Over the past few months, I wanted to create a place to collaborate on the rich Rubrik APIs and build powerful, community driven code to further enhance data center and cloud automation. I’ve carved out a repository on GitHub to do just that with a brand new PowerShell Module. I’m hoping that it will inspire others to work with RESTful APIs and further automate their operational workflows.

To start, I’ve built five cmdlets using a verb-noun format with embedded help. You can use [symple_highlight color=”yellow”]Get-Help[/symple_highlight] on each one for usage details and examples.

• Connect-Rubrik – Creates a connection with a Rubrik fabric via token and stores into a global variable.
• Get-RubrikSLA – Gets details on all of the SLA Domains.
• Get-RubrikVersion – Gets the running version of code.
• New-RubrikSnapshot – Creates an on-demand backup (snapshot) for a virtual machine. Accepts pipeline inputs from Get-VM (PowerCLI).
• Set-RubrikTag – Sets vSphere Client annotations for each VM that is assigned an SLA Domain.

It’s a start. And in the near future, I’m working with some stellar folks on vRealize Orchestrator workflows that I think you’re really going to dig. Lips sealed on that for now.

As much as I love the Rubrik UI, my focus is to never need it. Creating scripts and workflows to make private cloud automation a snap is the great enabler for tomorrow’s data center. It’s groovy that Rubrik has built its entire platform on a published API with such easy-to-use methods and models. It also means that we’re committed to the API and it won’t sit in a corner, neglected. Coupled with savvy scale-out smarts under the hood, the goal is to solve end-to-end data protection challenges for virtualized workloads (today) and physical workloads (soon).

If you have questions on the PowerShell code, feel free to ping me or file a bug. Or, if you’d like to contribute to any of the repository – documentation, code, suggestions – don’t hesitate! I’d be glad to help you send over your first pull request . This is for the community, after all, and we’re all learning new things. 🙂