Rubrik Releases Alta, Goes After $48 Billion TAM

Backup appliance company Rubrik has released its ninth iteration of its software, Rubrik 4.0 codenamed Alta.

Citing research from IDC, Rubrik claims in briefing materials that it is going after a $48 billion market termed Copy Data Management. The market comprises data protection and recovery, archiving, and replication, among other things.

Until now, Rubrik has largely contented itself with the enterprise portion of the backup and recovery and archive markets, competing with the likes of Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, Dell EMC Avamar, Cohesity, and Veeam, among others. Going after the broader copy data management use-cases places Rubrik amongst vendors like Actifio and Catalogic Software, while replication and DR means it's up against firms like Zerto and VMware.

That's a lot of competition.

The data protection market has been hot for several years after a marked lull since the acquisition battle for Data Domain back in 2009, ultimately won by EMC (Now Dell EMC). The rise of ransomware, such as the much publicised WannaCry outbreak most recently, has elevated the attention placed by organisations on ensuring their data can be restored if need be. For a long time, backup and recovery was seen as annoying insurance; not sexy, and invisible.

Now that the threat of losing all of your corporate data is far more salient, executives are taking notice, and opening up their wallets.

Technology has also improved. The rapid uptake of flash storage as a primary storage media has seen densities increase rapidly, with areal density surpassing that of spinning media in 2016. As densities increase, prices have decreased, making large quantities of flash affordable for a variety of workloads.

This hardware has been combined with a focus on simpler, easier to use software that can take advantage of the superior performance characteristics of flash media. Rubrik (and close rival Cohesity) have used flash and scale-out appliance architectures to make buying a data protection solution far easier than it used to be.

Rubrik has been rapidly adding features to its software, with this latest release providing in-built integration with Oracle RMAN, a key enterprise workload, as well as Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor and Nutanix AHV. Combined with existing support for VMware, Rubrik now supports the two largest enterprise hypervisors as well as the popular Nutanix scale-out hardware platform.

In this release, Rubrik also combines its archive to Amazon S3 functionality with the ability to instanciate VM images as Amazon EC2 instances for rapid recovery or DR purposes. This mirrors similar functionality available from vendors such as Veeam, and is particularly useful when combined with database row-level recovery, or as a mechanism for migration VMs to the cloud.

Initially a VM-centric product, Rubrik (like Veeam before it) has added tape support in this release. Rubrik said the lack of tape output functionality was a deal blocker for enterprise customers, particularly in EMEA and APAC regions. Rubrik has partnered with QStar Technologies to provide the software for tape support.

The cadence from Rubrik has been impressive so far. The company says it has grown its customer based by six times in the past year, and in April 2017 CEO Bipul Sinha told me Rubrik's average deal size was around $250,000.

If Rubrik can keep up this momentum, it has a solid shot at becoming much more than just a backup and recovery appliance company.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.