Ransomware rescue! HYCU has helped save a customer from a ransomware attack and DataDobi moved a petabyte of data off an end-of-lifed Isilon array to newer NetApp kit. The hubbub of background events in the storage industry is constant – as you will see from the shorter news bites.
HYCU protects French company in ransomware attack
An unnamed French construction equipment retail and rental company was hit by a ransomware attack, while in the process of transitioning from its legacy three-tier VMware environment to a new Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) using AHV and HYCU for backup and restore.
On a Sunday morning, the company’s IT manager started receiving alerts indicating strange activity. The servers were all encrypted with a cryptolocker, and the cyber thief demanded a ransom of several hundred bitcoins, equal to hundreds of thousands of Euros.
The IT manager said: “While we use several types of security software, the virus apparently entered via a computer under configuration and not ready for production and it was able to propagate throughout the environment from there.”
The company’s servers were shut down and the IT manager called HYCU support. HYCU’s Fast Restore feature keeps local snapshots on the Nutanix cluster. This snapshot was not compromised by the cryptolocker, so it offered a restore point for the Nutanix environment.
He said: “The HYCU team has extensive knowledge of the Nutanix REST API, so they were able to recreate our VMs with Nutanix snapshots using API request.” They had the company’s Nutanix infrastructure up and running normally within five hours. That was in time for the work week, avoiding business disruption.
This HYCU customer did not pay the ransom.
UMass uses DataDobi for Isilon to NetApp switch
UMass Memorial Health Care data centre in Massachusetts, uses a Dell EMC Isilon scale out network-attached storage platform to manage a variety of data, including medical applications and patient records. Earlier this year the organisation planned was to migrate the data from the Isilon and onto new, higher performing, and more secure NetApp storage.
Kevin Davis, Senior Storage Engineer, Systems Administration, and Information Service, said: “The Isilon had over a petabyte of NAS data, but any engineer that is confronting having to move data across platforms, let alone this much data, understands the problems that can arise can be insurmountable.”
He said: “The data is complex — there are countless disparate apps being used by the doctors and departments across the UMass Memorial Health Care network.” CIFS. SMB and NFS protocols were involved. To complicate things, the Isilon had been “end-of-lifed, meaning updates, support, and services are now virtually non-existent. So, not only is it much more expensive to support this gear, it can put data at risk.”
“I looked at NetApp XCP software, but their CIFS tool is lacking. And I had previous experience with Robocopy and rsync, but I just didn’t have the time for all the planning, trouble-shooting, and scripting that I knew would be involved with those tools. Moreover, Robocopy and rsync lack reporting capabilities, except for some very basic logs.”
He used DataDobi’s DataMigrate product instead and was pleased with the result: “The initial replication is fast, but after DobiMigrate completes it, it is ridiculously fast. You can open as many threads as your network can handle,” he said.
“Also, it is able to plow through metadata and discover changes in our databases in an incredibly fast and efficient manner. And any kind of error is also a cakewalk. DobiMigrate manages it all, even when users add something as foreign as emojis in the file name. Yes, that actually happens.”
Shorts
Security-focussed data protector Acronis and the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology (SIT) today announced the launch of a Roborace team, the Acronis SIT Autonomous Roborace Team, with Acronis being the Official Cyber Protection Partner. This is the world’s first driverless electric racing car competition.
SaaS in-cloud backup supplier Clumio said it has experienced an eight-time increase in platform customers protecting more than one data source across private cloud, public cloud and SaaS compared to seven months ago. It has tripled employee headcount, hiring more than 50 per cent of its total company roster during the pandemic. The company protects four data sources; AWS EC2, EBS and RDS, VMware Cloud on AWS and Microsoft 365.
DH2i today announced the availability of DxEnterprise for Availability Groups in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This enables Microsoft SQL Server availability groups (AGs) to be made highly available within and between Windows and Linux nodes and across any type of infrastructure.
DigitalFilm Tree (DFT), a creative supplier to the world’s media, tech and entertainment companies, is using Excelero’s NVMesh software as the centrepiece of a new storage architecture. DFT CTO Thomas Galyon said: “Excelero will let us store any file format we throw at it, and run on any server, with 10x faster render processing and at least 100x greater total aggregate bandwidth than our previous software. The added bandwidth lets us send project content out to clients far faster.”
IBM has published a Red Book entitled “Deployment and Usage Guide for Running AI Workloads on Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA DGX Systems with IBM Spectrum Scale” It shows how one ESS3000 NVMe box running Spectrum Scale can more than handle the workload of two DGX-1 Systems running 16x V100 GPUs on a real world AI workload.
Kasten has integrated the K10 Kubernetes data management platform with VMware vSphere and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service.
This week’s Microsoft Ignite 2020 saw the company bringing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to Azure Stack HCI. A preview is available. With AKS, developers can deploy and manage containerised applications with Azure Stack HCI in the same way as they would in Azure.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 is now available. It has HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration and a OneDrive for Business Backup feature protects OneDrive user accounts. A Free edition gives businesses the opportunity to use Backup for Microsoft Office 365 for free for one year.
NetApp has announced Elastigroup for Azure Spot Virtual Machines. This feature simplifies and automates compute infrastructure provisioning and autoscaling while allowing cloud consumers to drastically reduce their compute spending by up to 90 per cent, along with providing high availability.
Retrospect, a StorCentric company, announced the general availability (GA) release of Retrospect Backup 17.5, which includes new cloud storage provider certifications and platform updates for Apple macOS, as well as performance enhancements to Retrospect Management Console.
ScaleMP, which virtualizes NVMe SSDs as memory, is offering its vSMP MemoryONE software for a range of AWS EC2 instances with NVMe SSDs. Available via AWS Marketplace, vSMP MemoryONE supports bare-metal instances and the newly announced vSMP MemoryONE v10 Preview supports AWS virtual instances.
LAKE Solutions, a cloud service provider in Switzerland, has deployed Scality RING, built on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 4000 Systems delivered with the GreenLake as-a-service consumption model, to power a new backup-as-a-service offering.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), NVM Express and DMTF has announced the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification version 1.2.1 and the 2020.3 release of DMTF Redfish provide functionality to ensure NVM Express (NVMe) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology environments can be managed entirely by Redfish and Swordfish.
StorageOS Version 2.2 is available through the Red Hat marketplace. V2.2 has been designed for organisations that want to run hyperconverged and/or multiple cluster Kubernetes environments with the underlying storage to support cloud-native workflows and stateful applications.
