Why Rubrik and NetApp Are Better Together

This article was originally published on December 21, 2020, and has been updated to reflect current solutions. 

The "other" critical latency

While most people concentrate on reducing latency in terms of bits and bytes, it's essential to pay attention to operational latency, where even a slight delay can cause significant business interruption and financial losses. This is especially true when minutes of downtime translates into millions of dollars.

Operational latency is a byproduct of many legacy solutions relying on manual processes or outdated technologies. For this discussion, we want to focus on the operational latency associated with legacy data management. 

Newer, more advanced technologies have replaced many manual processes that may have been required at one time. These include policy-driven service level agreements (SLAs), orchestration, self-service options, user-friendly APIs, global search capabilities across hybrid cloud deployments, and machine learning algorithms that optimize backup scheduling and data recovery. There have been numerous impactful advancements in these areas.

In recovery, you have two scenarios: minor speed bumps or potentially catastrophic disasters. The speed bumps are recoverable incidents that do not significantly impact business operations. Examples include when a user loses a single file, deletes a file or directory, or overwrites a document with another version. Speed bumps may be a common occurrence. Having operational self-service recovery tools with Google-like file search capabilities is crucial. The user can recover their file or directories themselves with no functional impact on the business. 

Then there are the potentially catastrophic disasters when the entire data center is non-functional, and you need to get it back up and running immediately. Imagine ransomware has corrupted your business-critical files. Consider the ramifications of the time it takes to discover the scope of the breach, factor in the recovery time associated with legacy tools and the forensics needed afterward. The operational inefficiencies are staggering, leading to increased outage duration and costs. Consider the costs of an outage:

• According to Coveware, by the second quarter of 2022, the average ransomware payment was over $220,000. Unfortunately, ransomware is a lucrative business. The good news is the median payment has gone down considerably, primarily due to fewer organizations paying ransoms.
• In the same Coveware study, the average downtime from a ransomware attack has risen to 24 days. The increased number of successful attacks against larger enterprises with complex networks has driven this increase. Additionally, attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Double extortion is now a thing.
• Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent annually over the next three years, reaching $10.5 trillion by 2025.
• An additional item in the  Top 10 Cybersecurity Predictions And Statistics For 2023 states that global ransomware damage costs are estimated to be over $265 billion by 2031.

Rubrik + NetApp better together

Rubrik and NetApp provide best-in-class data management, ransomware protection and recovery capabilities. When you combine these two solution providers focused on latency reduction, you have an entire data management platform that ensures low latency in every situation.

And for even further alignment, Rubrik's Cloud Data Management platform protects, automates and secures applications across data centers and clouds. Users can say goodbye to manual backup when they use Rubrik's AI-enabled SLA policy engine for automated backup, recovery and archival to NetApp's StorageGrid or public cloud. 

NetApp's StorageGRID is a software-defined object storage solution that supports industry-standard object APIs. With StorageGRID's ILM policy engine, users can create multiple service levels with metadata-driven object lifecycle policies, optimizing performance, cost and location.

With Rubrik and NetApp StorageGRID, users can automate data lifecycle management while leveraging StorageGRID as a cloud-scale, object-based archive target. Both Rubrik and the StorageGRID index file metadata to enable global file-level search for instant access to massive amounts of unstructured data. Users can quickly locate and restore VMs, databases, files and more across public or private clouds.

Rubrik and NetApp are perfect for data management, protection and low latency. Here are three key reasons why:

1. SnapDiff - Rubrik's joint integration with the ONTAP SnapDiff API reduces how long it takes to determine which files have changed on the NetApp NAS. With SnapDiff, Rubrik knows which files have changed on the NetApp NAS. This eliminates the need for a traditional file scan, looking for changed files.
2. StorageGRID - Rubrik has strong support for NetApp StorageGRID object storage. StorageGRID is a high-performance, low-cost way to store petabytes of strategic data on-premises. In addition to having high throughput links to StorageGRID, retaining the data on-premises eliminates the transfer hop from the cloud. But, if the cloud is your thing (it's ours!), see the next item.
3. Vision - NetApp and Rubrik are focused on enabling their customers to get data into the cloud in a way that makes sense without compromising choice. Their joint solutions ensure precise recovery, reduced egress charges and end-to-end encryption. Their shared vision will also help accelerate a customer's journey to the cloud, which is another kind of latency reduction.

Rubrik and NetApp work together to lower operational latency in every situation.

Take an idea out for a test drive via the WWT Advanced Technology Center 

Let's face it; transitioning to a more modern operational model takes work. WWT helps customers struggling with crucial business challenges, such as high latency, by offering a variety of services through our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), which lets our customers test-drive potential solutions. The robust technology testing environment helps customers zero in on end-to-end, multi-vendor solutions that meet business outcomes.

For example, WWT specialists can implement Rubrik's Cloud Data Management platform with NetApp's StorageGRID to prove it can exceed customers' business SLAs. Whether our customer wants to test it for 1,000 or 10,000 users, we can scale it inside the ATC. When our customers complete a test plan in the ATC, they go forward to deployment with the confidence of knowing they have a proven solution. 

Create an account on wwt.com to access interactive resources to help you digitally transform your data and improve all aspects of data management, from security to latency.