This fast-moving storage vendor announced a $61 million Series C investment and unveiled its new platform, Firefly
Big news today from storage vendor Rubrik—both on a product front and a business one.
First to the dollars: Rubrik is announcing a $61 million Series C investment led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and angel investors. This is a huge round, especially given the current state of the venture capital space, and it is a testimony to Rubrik’s execution to date.
The investment takes Rubrik’s total funding to date to $112 million and will give the company the confidence to ramp up its sales, marketing and operations spend to take advantage of the opportunity it has. And if you needed an indication of just how big that opportunity is, that $112 million has poured in over a short period of only 30 months precisely because the market opportunity is huge. The legacy data management market is estimated to be $48 billion in value, and it is undergoing seismic changes right now.
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Rubrik’s part in this potential disruption is not insignificant. The company has created what it calls a cloud data management platform. Essentially what that means is large organizations use Rubrik as the platform upon which they hang a bunch of different, but related, storage functionalities: data protection, search, analytics, archival and copy data orchestration. Those are all things customers need to manage their data, no matter where it lies.
Rubrik is part of a very current trend towards hybrid storage. Historically, the attitudes towards data storage were fairly polarized, with people either being in the on-premises or the public cloud camp. Perspectives have matured of late, however, and most accept that a hybrid approach will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
“As data centers are re-imagined for cloud, there’s a universal need for a data management platform that can orchestrate data anywhere,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “As data centers are re-imagined for cloud, there’s a universal need for a data management platform that can orchestrate data anywhere—across private and public clouds.”
Rubrik seems to be ticking all of the various boxes that go towards commercial success. It has picked up a number of large customers, including the all-important list of Fortune 500 companies. It has a strong go-to-market model with 150 resellers and distributors globally. It has beefed up its staff base to cover a number of international offices, including Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). And finally, it has penned partnerships and integrations with a host of vendors, including VMware, Pure Storage, Nutanix, Tintri, Cleversafe, Cloudian and Scality on the software side of the house, and public cloud vendors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Firefly platform announced
Rubrik today also announced the release of Firefly. Firefly has been in beta with an early access program, and the company claims it had customers beating down the door to get access to it. Particular product extensions from this release includes extending Rubrik’s platform to support:
- Physical Microsoft SQL Servers: Simplifying Microsoft SQL server protection with a single service-level agreement policy engine to automate SQL server data management and deliver application-consistent, incremental-forever, and point-in-time recovery (PITR) with intelligent log management.
- Physical Linux Servers: Enabling protection for physical Linux servers by enabling policy-driven, incremental-forever data management while providing global predictive search for instant access to file versions across clouds.
- Remote and Branch Offices: Extending data management to all business locations with Rubrik Edge. Delivered as a software appliance, Rubrik Edge retains the core Rubrik approaches while providing complete data protection to remote and branch offices.
My POV
I’m all about the concept of fabrics. Whether we’re talking about compute, networking or storage, the future opportunity is huge for organizations that deliver broad fabrics that allow organizations to layer control, orchestration and management over a wide variety of different components.
In the case of storage, that means supporting public and private cloud, legacy on-premises assets, and other, as yet conceptual, innovations. I like Rubrik’s approach of articulating a very broad data management story. And the company’s latest funding, along with the obvious traction it is seeing, is an indication that it is moving in very much the right direction.
