You may not realise it, but your business revolves around data. Everything you have accumulated in the past and continue to accumulate is essential to your business’ operations, so you need to make sure all that data is protected.
You can do this by adding backup and DR software to your business continuity plan. Utilising these solutions will ensure you are fully protected from a data breach, a system failure or even a human error.
There are many leading backup and disaster recovery solutions on the market, so it can be hard to choose the right one for your business’ needs. The kind of solution you get can depend on the size of your business, its individual backup needs and the hardware you use.
In this article, we’ll break down the pros and cons of two solutions: Rubrik and Dell EMC Data Domain. Both provide similar offerings, so we’ll outline the differences to help you choose the best one for your business.
Rubrik: A New Data Recovery Company That Wants To Change DR Forever
Rubrik is the brainchild of founders and CEO, Bipul Sinha, Arvind Jain — an ex-Google employee — and Soham Mazumdar, who used to work for Facebook. The company, based in Palo Alto, has built a reputation for providing excellent data management and recovery solutions since its foundation in 2014 and has gone on to become one of the most successful firms in the DR industry.
The company’s primary offering is its data management platform. The idea behind the product is to help firms integrate all aspects of their data management processes, helping them get a sense of what data they have and providing them with tools to analyse it.
Rubrik claims that it offers firms best-in-class integration with existing apps and IT environments. The platform is just as at home on physical machines as it is on the edge and in the cloud, providing fabulous flexibility to firms that need it. From the very start, Rubrik wanted to be a “vendor agnostic” company, and — perhaps more than anybody else in the market — this is what it has achieved. The platform works across a range of environments, including a variety of OS platforms on physical, virtual and NoSQL.
Rubrik’s fundamental mission is to create a single software platform that meets all of a company’s data management and recovery needs. Yes, it offers the basics of backup and recovery, and disaster recovery, but it also integrates search (important for discovering what data a firm actually has), testing and development, and reporting and analytics. From a single, intuitive UI, firms can look at the data they have and then probe it for valuable information: no need to integrate with third-party software with poor interoperability.
Rubrik uses what it calls a “policy-driven” cloud data management system. The purpose of this is to wipe out management complexity and create a single engine through which all SLA pass during their life cycle. A single programmatic interface across cloud and hybrid environments controls the whole lot.
Dell EMC Data Domain: The Benchmark For Data De-Dupe Appliances
Dell, founded in 1979 by Michael Dell, is a multi-billion-dollar IT company which focuses on a range of hardware and software products. Just like Rubrik, it’s made significant strides into the data protection and disaster recovery arena, offering a stack of both hardware and software products to help firms maintain access to their information.
Dell EMC Data Domain is the company’s flagship data protection product. When a company purchases Data Protection Suite — the company’s DR integration software — they get a range of tools that allow them to manage their Dell EMC protection environment.
Rather like Rubrik, Dell recognises the advantages of monitoring data from a single platform. Dell’s dashboard provides a range of features, including a top-level view for management to track and control data protection as well as more granular tools for analysts and data engineers.
The company wants to make the system easy to use and understand for IT professionals with less experience and provides a range of simple walk-through videos. It’s not the most intuitive product in the world, but it has become the benchmark for dedupe applications.
Speaking of dedupe, Dell focuses heavily on making sure that companies can use resources, whether local or in the cloud, as efficiently as possible. It has powerful dedupe tools that allow firms to improve storage utilisation and cut costs.
Rubrik vs Dell EMC Data Domain
Rubrik and Dell EMC Data Domain offer similar capabilities. Rubrik is a software-based solution that works across a range of enterprise-level computing environments, and Dell EMC data domain integrates both hardware and software into an overall product stack.
The fact that Dell EMC Data Domain offers both is a byproduct of the company’s history. Dell was once a hardware provider, putting badges on computer towers, laptops and monitors and shipping products by the millions. It still does that to some degree, but it’s changed its focus towards being more of a cloud solutions firm. The fact that it has expertise in both, however, means that it can offer both hardware and software as part of its data management solutions.
What’s so remarkable about Rubrik is that, despite being a relatively new firm, it also offers a combination of hardware and software. Its range of appliances for small, medium and large companies come with varying HDD and SSD capacities, depending on the needs of the organisation.
Perhaps the most significant difference between Rubrik and Dell EMC Data Domain is the fact that Rubrik focuses on ease-of-use. The product is far more user-friendly than Dell’s, while at the same time, offering robust functionality. With Rubrik, you can do everything DR-related from a simple, intuitive user-interface, connecting siloed aspects of your IT environment into a single, comprehensive system.
Where Dell’s offering excels is different. The company focuses on creating best-in-class dedupe technology, allowing customers to reduce redundant storage and get the best efficiency possible. With better dedupe, Dell’s EMC Data Domain makes it possible for firms to wipe out the vast majority of their duplicated content and get better value for money.
What’s the verdict?
Dell’s EMC Data Domain is for professional-level enterprises with deep IT experience. Although the company tries to provide less experienced professionals with support and education, this is a product targeted at those with lots of experience in the industry. Rubrik, on the other hand, is easier to use and has the added advantage of being able to slot into practically any software setup you may have.
The choice of DR platform depends on the specific needs, skills and experience of your company. The good news is that specialists can help you make the right choice of which product to buy.
Remember, other factors need to be considered when applying a DR plan, not just hardware and software. Having great software and hardware for backup is great, but you need total business continuity solutions to use it effectively. Specialists in data management can help you build a complete solution that will protect your business.
