Rubrik Firefly: ROBO & Erasure coding

Rubrik's 3rd release Firefly was announced a couple of days ago, but what is it? According to Chris' blog on rubrik.com it's a code upgrade for the current briks. Supporting new features like backup for physical MSSQL and linux servers, a virtual appliance offering and erasure coding. Besides the existing S3 and NFS options also Azure Blob Storage was added as an archival destination, Yeah!

Rubrik Edge

I especially like the Virtual Edge Appliance for use in remote and branch offices. Rubrik doesn't mention this, but I assume this could also be of use for hybrid cloud architectures for backup, replication and restores between and back and forth the local datacenter and public clouds like Amazon and MS Azure? I'm wondering though how the architecure differs from the physical one. Does it consist of a single virtual node in ROBO environments instead of multiple ones? And without the physical backing of the supermicro hardware and the SSD for intake in each node, did they've downsized on options like indexing, dedup/compression or erasure coding? Let's hope I can get my hands on a OVA soon! :)

Erasure Coding

Since the current brik's save each block three times you only get a third of available space from your R334, R344, R348 or R528. Global dedup and compression off course do a lot to save space, but erasure coding still was missing, until now! Erasure coding gives you 66% of total space (at least on the 4 node models). And therefore doubles the available space and stretches the 15TiB on the R344 up to 30TiB. But that's not all, Rubrik is also saying the performance will go up for writes and reads and scales as the cluster grows!

I really like Rubrik and the architecture and the vision behind their product, and i'm sure the extra 61M is in good hands and the Firefly release will do great for current customers' briks!