Rubrik Acquires Assets of Igneous

This article was written on December 16, 2020 by Dan Rogers, president, GTM operations, on the blog of Rubrik, Inc.

Rubrik acquired key technology and IP assets from Igneous, Inc., and welcome the existing Igneous customers and their innovative team into its family.

Igneous is a company that specializes in NAS/unstructured data management.

Today, businesses are experiencing a rise in unstructured data like never before. In fact, some 80% of global enterprise data is driven from unstructured data. It’s everywhere – text files, emails, social media, digital images, instant messages, sensor data – are all classified as unstructured data. And the majority of this generated data is stored as files – billions and billions of files. As an industry, we are looking to discover, protect, archive, and extract real business value from unstructured data hidden in these files, stored in NAS.

Coping with trillions of files
As businesses create, modify, and use these billions of files, they struggle with very basic needs: How do they make a backup copy of this data? What’s an efficient way of moving and storing these copies? When it comes to recovering files, how do they find the ones they need? They’re aware the future of data is cloud-based, so they want to ensure there’s a way to bridge their NAS data to cloud storage. Current tape-based protection solutions are certainly not able to keep up as businesses shift towards an API-driven, hybrid data center future. 

NAS data can present significant challenges to data management solutions – it requires a technically sophisticated yet simple solution to manage the size and scale of such systems. 

Solution 
With Rubrik’s pioneering NAS data management solution, we skipped past the constraints of legacy NDMP architecture. We use the standard NAS protocols (NFS and SMB) to allow for incremental-forever snapshots and backup and restore from any NAS. We designed Direct Archive to allow very large NAS workloads to be efficiently managed in the cloud rather than requiring even more physical appliances. We built file indexing directly into the product for easy file level recovery. 

“Combining the innovative technology that Igneous has built with the power and breadth of Rubrik’s platform will bring the best in class solution for unstructured data management to our customers,” said Vinod Marur, SVP engineering, Rubrik. “We are very excited to bring the Igneous team into the Rubrik family and enable our customers to realize the value of their unstructured data while reducing risk and optimizing IT resource utilization.” 

Igneous technology works well with petabyte-scale, high-performance NAS systems, demonstrating the ability to migrate, index, and protect this workload in hybrid environments. It is capable of scanning hundreds of millions of NAS files, indexing the metadata: and transferring data protection copies to the cloud with an incremental-forever architecture.

The technology also offers a simple to use web interface in managing this data with the capability for deeper API-driven integration. There is a synergy between the two companies’ approaches to managing NAS data. 

In addition, customers rely on Igneous to discover low access-rate files and move them off primary storage to lower-cost tiers, and to backup files. While other suppliers can do this, the scale at which Igneous makes this possible is what truly sets their technology apart.

What’s next?
As a next step, combined customers can look forward to a unified NAS data management solution, where Igneous’ technology is integrated into the Rubrik platform.
 
“The combination of Igneous’ unique approach to unstructured data coupled with Rubrik’s extensive data management capabilities and their reach in the market is exactly what leading enterprises need today,” said Jeff Hughes, former CTO, Igneous. “Together our technology is built for the future and we’re thrilled to be part of the Rubrik family and offer our joint customers the best data management solutions.” 

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