Silicon Valley Road Trip – Day 1

On the 27 and 28 of august I’m having a road trip through Silicon Valley with fellow colleges @rutgerkoster @nielshagoort and @frankdenneman.

These day where’re going to visit 4 startup companies who are so kind to spend a couple of hours on us to tell us there latest innovations.

Yesterday we had the pleasure to visit Rubrik and Platform9.

Rubrik developed a Converged Data Management time machine/backup appliance for the midrange and upper marked who can be setup in 15 minutes. Chris Wahl took us through a 1 hour presentation which he is also going to present at VMworld in San Francisco and probably  also in Barcelona.

The Converged Data Management solution of Rubrik can be scaled from 3 nodes to infinite. Enabling a backup solution with a unlimited retention time without the need for tapes. And let’s be honest. Tape should be death but if you want a retention time more than a year it’s hard to get around tapes these day’s. There solution can be attached to the Amazon cloud with S3 so you’re able to do a tier2 backup in house (or on a second datacenter) and a tier3 backup in the cloud. When a file or a virtual machine needs to be restore you just query the database of Rubrik (which is a Casandara database) for that specific file or virtual machine and a version who you want to restore. It doesn’t matter if this file is situated in your private datacenter or in the public cloud. This is completely transparent and encrypted. Using the cloud for tier3 backup can be useful for companies who need a long retention time like legal or health care.

I especially like to 2 things about there solution.

In traditional backup solutions you create a backup job where you configure several settings like destination and retention time. In Rubrik you create a backup policy and attaches this policy to a virtual machine. This policy has al the necessary setting configured. The dashboard of Rubrik gives a overview how long you can keep your backup based on the current capacity. If after a few years you need more capacity, you just add more nodes to the solution. Enabling you to grow on demand when every you need to.

Because Rubrik is API driven you can create custom backup scripted as you need. Currently Rubrik has no support for application aware backup for example Exchange. This is one the definitely looking into. But with the API (who are well documented) it shouldn’t be that hard to create a consistent application aware backups.

Platform9 was so kind to tell us there story during lunch. Platform9 developed a cloud solution for administrating and automating a multi hypervisor environment in the private cloud who can be global situated. There main focus is Openstack but also docker, KVM and VMware are supported.

The first part of our meeting we saw a slide deck prsented by Sirish Raghuram. After about 30 minutes the projector was turned of and we had a real nice and inspiring discussion with Hirish Raghuram and Madhura Maskasky about there product and what the world needs a this moment.

Traditional solutions are normally VM based and not workload based. Meaning that if your webserver environment needs more performance you add more performance to your webserver environment. This can be a web server or maybe a proxy with a load balancer configured or both. This is a completely different approach of deploying services. It doesn’t matter where it runs, on which hypervisor it runs, you just need the capacity for this type of services.

That there is going to be a  multi hypervisor world in the next couple of years it for sure. I know that a lot of companies don’t want to support more than 1 hypervisor because of the cost of managing different platforms but what if you have 1 management tool who can do it all.  Yes, of course you need to support vSphere, KVM and/or Openstack.  But I’m convinced the installation and maintenance of these hypervisors will be simplified in the next couple of years. And does the other hypervisor need to be on-premise? Or can this also be the public cloud?
The need for a capacity calculation is no longer needed if you just can add resources to your environment as you grow or shrink. Yes of course there are licenses involved. But the licensing model as we know right now will change. It has to! The number 1 cost in a datacenter at the moment are licenses. This is why the public cloud can be interesting for companies. You do not need to worry about licensing, hardware cost, etc. But I can imaging you don’t want all your data in the cloud. Putting your data in the cloud is easy. Getting it out can be painful. So a transparent solution supporting multiple hypervisors is a welcome solution!