Komprise has pushed out elastic replication that it says provides more affordable disaster recovery for non-mission-critical file data at sub-volume level.
Komprise’s Intelligent Data Management product can tier data between costly and fast storage and less expensive but slower access storage on-premises or in the public cloud. It says that disaster recovery of mission-critical file data is traditionally provided by mirroring NAS systems to a remote site and this synchronously replicates data at the volume level to an identical target NAS system using the same infrastructure. If the source NAS is affected by ransomware, that gets replicated as well.
Komprise CEO Kumar Goswami states: “Our customers are uneasy about not having disaster recovery plans for all unstructured data, but as unstructured data volumes continue to balloon, the one-size-fits-all mirroring approach is too expensive for most.”
The underlying assumption is that customers also wish to secure their non-mission-critical data against disasters, but find it prohibitively expensive. It’s important to note that unstructured (file) data varies in criticality, ranging from “must not lose” to “doesn’t really matter.”
Komprise is providing so-called elastic replication at the sub-volume level so that shares or directories can be asynchronously replicated to a target file or object store that could be in the public cloud. It implies that this provides time for ransomware affecting such files to be detected and cleaned before the replication, and hence is safer than sync replication, which is nearly instantaneous. The replication can be to an immutable, object-locked target to provide resistance to ransomware attacks against the target systems.
Its replication is based on snapshots and the file metadata, including versioning, is retained if the files are sent to object targets, meaning that files can be restored from them with no loss of fidelity. The replication schedule can be based on user-set policies.
Komprise also claims that it can cut the cost of disaster recovery by 70 percent or more from the synchronous NAS-to-NAS schemes, with the source for this claim described in a blog going live later today.
Goswami said: ”We are excited to help organizations customize disaster recovery so they can afford the protection they need for all of their data, within tight budgets.”
Peer Software also provides asynchronous replication for Windows Server, as does Dell with its PowerFlex and StorONE for itsS1 systems. However, these solutions are system-specific, whereas Komprise is not.
Elastic replication is provided in a winter release of the Intelligent Data Management software. This allows users to save custom report configurations and maintain multiple versions of any type of report. It also supports tiering from Pure Storage FlashBlade//S to an on-premises FlashBlade//E target. As we wrote in March, the FlashBlade//E evolved from the FlashBlade//S and adds storage-only blades to the existing compute+storage blades to increase capacity and lower cost. Moving rarely accessed files and objects from the //S to the //E makes space on the //S for more more important data. Pure resells Komprise software.
