Data protector NAKIVO has added bare-metal recovery, a malware scan capability plus direct recovery from tape in v10.9 of its Backup & Replication software.
The company provides backup, ransomware protection and disaster recovery for virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments. It claims to have had 28 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and says it has a network of over 7,500 partners and 25,000 paid customers worldwide, including Honda, Cisco, Coca-Cola and Siemens. In September it said it had 23,000 customers, up from 16,000 at the beginning of 2021, and 7,000 partners, up from 5,000 at the start of 2021. Customers include direct end users and MSPs.
NAKIVO is an established backup player and, like the others, has to constantly and incrementally improve its offering as backup data sources proliferate and recovery needs expand. Co-founder and CEO Bruce Talley reflected this, saying: “Today’s highly competitive digital environment makes high availability a new norm. We keep improving our solution to provide everything our customers need to meet their objectives while maintaining the required level of security.”
Recovery to a bare-metal, new-environment server is about restoring an entire server or workstation from a backup to identical hardware without rebuilding the operating systems or reconfiguring application settings. This extends the existing physical-to-virtual machine recovery function.
It’s now thought necessary to check backups for malware to avoid restoring a system with in-built malware.
Commvault announced its Threat Scan feature earlier this month, which looks for corrupted or suspicious datasets, and can locate and quarantine malware and threats from backup content.
Veritas v10, released in February last year, provides automatic malware scanning during backups and prior to restores. It has AI-driven anomaly detection, which can automatically initiate malware scanning.
NAKIVO’s Backup Malware scan feature enables customers to integrate external anti-malware software and scan backups for malicious code before using them for recovery. It is an add-on to the existing anti-ransomware features. Immutable backups should prevent this happening, unless the backed-up data contains malware.
The company provides immutable backups for Amazon S3, generic S3-compatible storage (Beta), Wasabi, Azure Blob Storage, or Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and also local folders. Object Lock or version-level immutability support should be enabled for the bucket or blob container used to store backups. This type of immutability cannot be shortened or lifted, not even by the root user.
With the local folder type of Backup Repository, immutable recovery points cannot be overwritten, deleted, or changed by anyone except the root user before the specified period expires. But when deployed as part of a VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV virtual appliance, or a pre-configured AMI in Amazon EC2, users can make recovery points stored in this type of repository immutable, and the immutability cannot be lifted or changed by anyone, not even the root user.
v10.9 enables faster recovery from tape of full VMs, EC2 instances, and physical machines to VMware VMs, without using a staging repository first. It also adds support for VMware vSphere 8.0 U1 and Debian v10-11.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.9 is now available for download and a 15-day free trial is available.
