Rubrik Eyes Unstructured Data with Igneous Deal

Rubrik, the multi-cloud data manager, moved to bolster its unstructured data management capabilities with the acquisition of Igneous, whose platform provides monitoring and storage for dispersed data.

Rubrik, Palo Alto, Calif., said Wednesday (Dec. 16) it would acquire the technology and intellectual property assets of Igneous that include network-attached storage (NAS) and unstructured data management tools.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Rubrik said it would also acquire Igneous customers.

Dan Rogers, who joined Rubrik in March 2020 as president, said the Igneous deal addresses the proliferation of unstructured data, most of it stored as trillions 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,” Rogers noted in a blog post announcing the Igneous acquisition.

Along with wringing more value from unstructured data, the acquisition of the Igneous platform would help Rubrik’s customers in “minimizing risk and optimizing IT resource utilization,” added Vinod Marur, Rubrik’s senior vice president of engineering.

The Igneous platform works with petabyte scale NAS systems and is used to migrate, index and secure unstructured data files in hybrid IT deployments. Rubrik said the deal gives it the ability to scan millions of NAS files, index metadata and transfer secured copies to the cloud via its backup strategy known as “incremental-forever” snapshots. That approach is designed to reduce data growth while providing faster data recovery.

“There is a lot of synergy between Igneous’ and Rubrik’s approaches to managing NAS data,” Rogers said.

Seattle-based Igneous announced layoffs in November, citing a “difficult economic environment.”

The deal for Igneous follows a month after Rubrik released the latest version of its Andes cloud data management platform. The 5.3 version includes faster recovery times for enterprise workloads, including SQL server backups and reduced cloud archiving costs.

Rubrik and other cloud data management vendors are targeting exploding data growth—especially unstructured data—along with the accelerating enterprise shift to multiple cloud services. With the amount of data created, copied and stored expected to reach more than 59 zettabytes this year, according to an IDC estimate, Rubrick and others are offering a growing menu of tools for managing unstructured data.

Recent items:

Rubrik Tunes Upgrade to VMware Users

Data Management Falls Short for Unstructured Data

Data Manager Eyes NoSQL in the Cloud