NetApp, Rubrik Partnership Brings Data Protection To Hybrid Multi-cloud Storage Deployments

Data protection and management vendor Rubrik worked with NetApp's SnapDiff API to develop a meet-in-the-channel offering that combines NetApp's hybrid multi-cloud capabilities with Rubrik's high-performance data protection technology.

Cloud data management and data protection technology developer Rubrik is working with storage vendor NetApp to enable channel partners of both companies to easily attach Rubrik's data management offerings to NetApp's hybrid multi-cloud platform.

The new strategic relationship, unveiled Thursday, is a meet-in-the-channel partnership which brings Rubrik's next-generation data protection and orchestration technology to joint customers, said Wendy Bahr, chief commercial officer for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.

"That next-generation capability is everything NetApp has been looking for, and what customers have been looking for," Bahr told CRN. "It's a great opportunity for NetApp partners."

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With the relationship, Rubrik is taking advantage of NetApp's SnapDiff API which quickly identifies the file and directory differences between two NetApp Snapshot copies, Bahr said.

With the SnapDiff API, clients do not have to back up an entire data set, but instead can back up can just backup changes to the data, she said.

"In a typical deployment, an enterprise customer may have hundreds of petabytes of storage, and will be looking to manage backup and recovery of that data," she said. "This traditionally has been a time-intensive, labor-intensive process. But with NetApp SnapDiff APIs, we are taking out a lot of the labor."

The combination offers partners and their clients big potential performance increases, Bahr said.

"This collaboration has blazing performance," she said. "There's no more poor performance for backups and recovery. In one example, a customer's backup time went from 14 hours to 15 minutes."

Rubrik has developed a great data protection platform that adds a lot of value to NetApp implementations, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider that partners with both vendors.

"The technology combination around SnapDiff is important," Woodall told CRN. "NetApp talks a lot about helping customers build the Data Fabric. But NetApp can't do every component on its own. It needs partners. And Rubrik has proved to be a good partner."

With the new partnership, existing NetApp channel partners will now get a robust and simple data protection platform, Woodall said.

"Simplification sells," he said. "Rubrik makes it easy to set the policies and do the integration. This plays well with the idea of data being the 'new oil.' Customers need to extract value from it, and need to protect it."

This is not the first partnership between NetApp and Rubrik. The two started collaborating in May, and in September unveiled Rubrik Cloud Data Management for NetApp StorageGRID which allows automated data lifecycle management through Rubrik’s control plane while using StorageGRID as a cloud-scale object-based archive target, Bahr said.

Because of the new relationship between the two vendors, Rubrik next week will attend the NetApp Insight 2019 conference in Las Vegas for the first time, and will be a sapphire-level sponsor of the event, she said.