Barely two months after exiting stealth with $10 million in freshly raised venture capital, Rubrik Inc. has secured another funding round more than four times that size to aid its mission of eliminating the need for backup software. And the team is finally revealing how it plans to go about accomplishing that ambitious goal.

The centralized backup and recovery solution that Rubrik promised after completing its original investment in late March is a 2U commodity appliance pre-configured to run its ​homegrown data management software. At the foundation of the platform is a patent-pending file system that makes it possible to extend built-in storage with resources from the public cloud.

Administrators can take advantage of that hybrid functionality to use the machine as a go-to backup target for all the virtual machines in their environments, which Rubrik is actively trying to encourage with the inclusion of automatic discovery functionality in the machine. That reach allows for unified policy enforcement and monitoring across the entire corporate network.

But the main feature setting the platform apart from traditional alternatives is its ability to map out all the different files and data used by those instances through a single pane of glass, which simplifies the tedious task of identifying redundancies. That’s the same value proposition that Actifio Inc. and Delphix Inc. have been offering with their respective data virtualization technologies for the last few years, with a few twists.

Standing out in particular is the fact that the Rubrik Hybrid Cloud Appliance provides the ability to quickly allocate some of the on-board capacity normally used for storing backups to applications as primary storage. That can be tremendously useful for non-critical workloads such as development environments that don’t require the same advanced functionality as something like a database but still need to be kept behind the firewall due to various considerations, such as regulatory compliance.

The system is available in two configurations ranging from 3 nodes with 10 terabytes of disk storage to four nodes and 15 terabytes. The new $41 million in funding from Greylock Partners and existing investors, including  Microsoft chairman John Thompson, will pay for marketing and channel initiatives to help sell more units.
Photo by Kevin Dooley via Flickr