As temperatures begin to drop, Rubrik and NetApp’s relationship continues to heat up after announcing yet another joint service late last week that will integrate Rubrik’s cloud data management service with NetApp’s SnapDiff APIs to shared customers for faster ONTAP backups. 

This particular service offering aims to simplify how large organizations with vast network-attached software (NAS) environments manage and orchestrate data. 

“Rubrik will bring unprecedented levels of data control and visibility on top of NetApp Data Fabric to help joint customers get the most value from their data residing on-premises or in hybrid or multi-cloud environments,” Rubrik CTO Chris Wahl wrote in an email to SDxCentral. 

Performing a file scan has traditionally been the only way to detect changes made on a storage array and glean insight as to what might have been added, modified, or deleted — which, for storage arrays that contain millions of files across petabytes of data, encompasses the span of multiple days, explained Wahl. 

“NetApp storage arrays have the ability to take a point-in-time snapshot of their [customers’] filesystem state. When multiple snapshots are taken, the NetApp storage array has the ability to detect the differences between two snapshots - hence, SnapDiff,” Wahl said. 

As a result, agility and flexibility are new menu items for Rubrik users through NetApp's SnapDiff API which identifies file and directory differences between NetApp Snapshot copies.

Leveraging SnapDiff’s API will enable channel partners to coordinate policy-based snapshots as they pertain to customer requirements for Recovery Point Objective’s (RPO) with an auto-generated list of detected changes made since the last snapshot was taken. 

The kicker: lists that traditionally might have taken hours or days to compile, Wahl claims, are generated in a span of seconds or minutes to deliver to Rubrik from NetApp SnapDiff.

"Customers will see [a tenfold] increase in performance, with 14-hour backups reduced to less than an hour," Wahl said. 

From there, Rubrik can run a parallelized ingest (data copy) from the primary NetApp storage array — thus, eliminating the need to backup an entire data set —  and serve customers’ backup data order via Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform to the private or public cloud (or both) archive of their choice, Wahl explained.  

“Together, Rubrik and NetApp provide business continuity via data mobility across data centers and cloud, decrease time-to-market for new feature development, increase [return on investment] with smarter data usage, all while supporting ever-increasing data privacy regulations and compliance,” he said.

This joint service offering comes exactly one month after Rubrik and NetApp teamed up to integrate Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform with NetApp’s enterprise-grade storage platform, StorageGRID, bundling backup software and storage that is purpose-built for cloud.

Since last month’s announcement to provide NetApp customers with policy-driven automation, hybrid cloud flexibility, and data accessibility for protection of their NAS environments, leveraging Rubrik to replicate their NAS data to other NetApp end targets including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, it would seem only fair for NetApp to reciprocate the favor.

In view of last week’s announcement, and amid reports earlier this month that the data management unicorn is looking for a buyer — a story that co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha strongly denies — timing and continued partnerships suggests the two may wish to become one.

But Wahl echoed Sinha’s stance on the matter: “Rubrik is not for sale. We are committed to building a long-lasting, independent company.”