Ransomware is a big threat to organisations of all sizes. According to one piece of research, around two-thirds of disaster recovery incidents are a result of ransomware. Meanwhile, firms take an average of 21 days to recover to normal operations.

The growth of ransomware has put data storage and backup on the frontline of cyber defences, and as firms have bolstered their anti-ransomware measures, attackers have become more sophisticated and dangerous.

Attackers have moved from encrypting production data to targeting backups and backup systems. Their goal is to make it harder for organisations to recover, and so more likely they will pay a ransom. Also, double- and triple-extortion attacks where criminal groups threaten to expose sensitive data, or even use it to target individuals have raised the stakes still further.

In response, chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) have looked to harden systems against ransomware attack, with use of immutable snapshots, air-gapped backups and artificial intelligence (AI)-based threat detection. Suppliers have also bolstered anti-ransomware tools. Some are even offering ransomware recovery guarantees that offer financial compensation if an attack does happen.

Ransomware attacks work by spreading malware that disables access to data. The malware usually enters the organisation through phishing, infected documents, or compromised or malicious websites. It acts to encrypt data, then attackers demand a ransom for the decryption key.

The first line of defence is to detect and block phishing attacks, through antivirus and malware detection on client devices and on the network, and through user awareness and training.

Much of this is standard cyber hygiene. Most methods that work against malware and phishing will work equally against ransomware. Security researchers point out that the malware component of ransomware attacks is often not very sophisticated.

However, although cyber hygiene measures will reduce risks, they are not fool-proof. Therefore, firms also look at deeper levels of data protection against encryption, as well as detecting and blocking suspicious activity on the network.

Good backups remain an important defence against ransomware. If a firm can recover its data from a clean backup, they have a good chance of returning to normal operations without the need to pay a ransom. And, as security advisors such as the UKs NCSC point out, paying the ransom is no guarantee of being able to recover data.

Off-site backup, or data that is air gapped and separated either physically or logically from production systems, provide a good level of protection, but recovery from off-site backups can be slow.

A clean recovery also requires users to spot an attack early enough to prevent backups being infected by malware. Also, attackers now actively target backup systems, with a view to disabling them or corrupting backup files.

This has led storage suppliers to build additional levels of ransomware protection into storage and backup technologies to provide additional layers of defence.

One of the most common measures deployed by suppliers to counter ransomware is immutable backups. Often these are snapshots, which are usually immutable anyway. Snapshots have the added advantage of quick restore times, and they can be stored locally, offsite or in the public cloud. Their disadvantage is that the capacity they occupy can rapidly grow, so often snapshot retention periods are quite low.

A wide range of suppliers now offer immutable data copies, either in backup or directly on production storage.

Examples include Wasabis Object Lock immutability feature, for object storage, and Pures SafeMode snapshots on its FlashBlade and FlashArray systems, as well as object locking in PortWorx.

Vast Data is another supplier that provides immutable backups, using a feature it calls Indestructibility. Firms that use Amazon S3 can also apply Object Lock to buckets. A further approach is to harden the operating system; this is what Scality has done with Linux on its Artesca appliances. By hardening the OS, the supplier restricts admin tools an attacker could use to destroy or encrypt data.

There are, however, different levels of immutability. As James Watts, managing director at Databarracks, points out, the effectiveness of immutability depends on how systems are configured. A tool set for immutability at the backup level will not, for example, prevent an attacker from deleting underlying storage volumes. For ultimate protection, he recommends even backup copies and the storage target should be kept off domain.

The majority of backup suppliers now support air-gapped copies of data, and a growing number will work directly with public cloud storage to make it easier and less capital-intensive to store immutable backups offsite.

Chief information officers and data storage managers should check the capabilities of their backup and recovery tools, such as whether they can upload copies to the cloud or be used to create air-gapped datasets.

Immutable backups are not, however, foolproof. They will not protect an organisation if malware infects the snapshot.

This has prompted suppliers to add anomaly detection at the storage device and network level to help spot ransomware infections before they are triggered. Suppliers have increasingly made use of AI tools to spot anomalies across vast quantities of data, at speeds that are hopefully fast enough to prevent malware from spreading, and from encrypting or deleting data.

Such anomalies might include recognising abnormally large numbers of changes to files in a dataset, or increased levels of randomness in filenames or content, both of which could occur as ransomware begins to encrypt data.

Suppliers that offer this type of detection include Cohesity and NetApp, while Pure has AIOps-based anomaly detection in its Pure1 management platform. Commvault also has early warning features in its technology. Firms have in addition built ransomware detection into production data storage, not just backups, as they try to stay ahead of attacks.

Some suppliers have taken a further step by offering financial guarantees to support their data protection measures.

Veeam and NetApp are among the suppliers that offer ransomware warranties; Pure has a ransomware recovery service-level agreement which includes supplying hardware, and a technician, to recover data.

Firms should take their own steps to ensure any ransomware protection measures are suitable for their operations. Warranties, even those that offer seven- or eight-figure payouts, will only apply in tightly defined circumstances, and cash will only go so far to help an organisation if data has been put beyond reach. Theres no blanket policy or simple answer for every organisation, these decisions all need to balance cost and risk for what works for you, says Databarracks Watts.

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Network attached storage (NAS) is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the data storage market.For enterprises and other large organisations, NAS provides an efficient way to store ever-larger volumes of unstructured data, from media content and documents to AI training materials.

For smaller outfits, NAS offers a step up from internal storage in servers, providing familiar files and folders arrangement and largely similar management tools. They also run over the same standard Ethernet networks as existing PCs and servers.At the micro-business end of the market, a NAS box might even take the place of a server altogether, due to their simplicity and low cost.

NAS systems, however, have their limitations: access times are slower than direct-attached or server-based storage, and they will often be slower than a storage area network (SAN), not least because they use Ethernet rather than faster transports, such as Fibre Channel.

But the main drawback of traditional NAS is that its harder to scale. Once a NAS box is full, IT departments had to upgrade disks, or buy an entirely new NAS. This leads to high costs, or if they keep the old NAS silos of storage.

This prompted vendors to create scale-out NAS systems, where users can build a mesh of NAS nodes to form a single pool of storage, and it prompted vendors to create NAS functionality in the cloud.

NAS is file access storage that can be made available to any device on a network.At its most basic, a NAS box is a standalone, integrated device with a CPU, networking, memory and a number of bays for hard drives, SSDs or M.2 drives. It has its own operating system, and does not need a connection to a server or storage controller to function. Most admin tasks can be carried out via a web browser.

The heart of NAS is its file system. The file system allows the NAS to appear as a shared volume to any PC user or server on the network. Typically, NAS systems support Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols, for maximum application and OS compatibility.

A NAS is optimised for unstructured data files and documents whereas direct attached storage and SANs are optimised for block access, such as for databases.

Its the integration of the file system that defines NAS, in fact. When using a SAN, the file system resides elsewhere such as on servers or PCs with data held on the SAN in blocks accessed from those externally-held file systems.

NAS devices start small, but can be very large indeed.Small NAS boxes are popular for home offices and micro businesses. At the other end of the scale, enterprise vendors provide NAS units with eye-watering capacities. Chinese vendor Huawei, for example, recently launched its OceanStor Dorado V6, which runs to 32 controllers, 6,400 drives and almost 300PB of capacity.

The first enterprise NAS systems were filers, designed to deal with the growing volume of unstructured data coming into organisations as they moved to digital processes.

Filers from vendors such as NetApp and EMC (now owned by Dell) mopped up vast numbers of files in areas from medical imaging to media and document storage. Without filers, these documents would have overwhelmed server-based storage.

But the current landscape is far more complex. More applications use unstructured data and the performance of NAS hardware has increased with faster versions of Ethernet and the move to flash storage.

Scale-out NAS systems, with multiple nodes operating as a single, very large (virtual) volume, or single namespace, have also overcome some of the limitations of traditional standalone NAS. It is now possible to add storage quickly to a NAS system without applications or users being aware. IT teams can add nodes, and storage, as needed.A global namespace also allows enterprises to distribute storage across locations, including the public cloud.

Two other versions of NAS technology are also worth considering.First, for enterprises, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) brings together compute, storage and networking. In some use cases, HCI can replace NAS and SAN systems.At the other end of the spectrum, open-source utilities such as FreeNAS can turn redundant servers, or even desktop PCs, into cost-effective NAS boxes for smaller offices or home use.

The focus of filers and early NAS systems was capacity, not performance. Today, there is still a case for NAS for very large capacities. Few other systems can offer the same low cost per gigabyte of data. But conventional, capacity-driven use cases such as backups, archiving including for compliance reasons and handling relatively low-value documents have been joined by more demanding applications like storage for AI/ML training data and advanced analytics datasets.

This trend has also pushed NAS towards convergence with object storage capability, and HCI.

A cloud NAS uses public cloud storage to provide file access, usually via SMB or NFS. NetApps ONTAP, which includes NFS, is also widely supported.

Connecting a user device, or more likely a server, to a cloud NAS should be as simple as connecting it to local NAS hardware. The differences will largely be around capacity, cost, performance and the level of intelligence offered by cloud systems.

Cloud NAS has no real capacity limits although vendors may set an upper limit for practical administrative purposes. Google Cloud Platform, for example, limits a single namespace to 50PB.

The main performance limit of cloud NAS is the WAN connection to the service provider. If applications need high speeds and low latency, firms will need to invest in high speed fibre links. Alternatively, they could relocate applications to the cloud, if the provider supports compute. But on-premises systems are for now faster and much less costly.

When it comes to cost comparisons, customers need to consider that on-prem NAS hardware requires up-front capital investment. Also, firms often also have to buy more than they need and over-provision to minimise the cost and disruption of physical upgrades.

This is not an issue with the cloud, as it is charged by usage, but CIOs will want to control this. Long-term cloud storage can be expensive if users file and forget documents.

For this reason, the large cloud vendors and vendors such NetApp and IBM sell products aimed specifically at the backup and archive markets. These have more favourable cost structures than regular cloud NAS volumes.

Vendors also offer different tiers of cloud NAS, based on performance. Less important workloads or less frequently used data can move down to cheaper volumes. But, in all cases, buyers need to be aware of bandwidth and egress costs to access or download data.

However, there are use cases where cloud NAS is the best solution. These include where a business needs to scale up storage quickly without rewriting applications or porting them to the cloud; or where cost is less of an issue, such as for a short-term project; or to provide remote storage, collaboration and backup to small offices or remote workers.

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As promised in June, the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform has been made available in the Azure Marketplace as a managed application.

Lightbits software uses public cloud ephemeral storage instances to provide block storage that is faster and more affordable than Azures own block storage instances. These are Azure Disk Storage ones with its Ultra Disk Storage,Premium SSD v2,Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD options. Lightbits creates a fast SAN in the cloud by clustering virtual machines connected by NVMe over TCP. Its capable of delivering up to 1 million IOPS per volume and consistent latency down to 190 microseconds, and performance scales linearly as the cluster size increases.

This means tight SLAs for important apps, that otherwise could not be moved to the Azure cloud, can be met. Kam Eshghi, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Lightbits, said in a statement that customers get the highest performance possible on Azure at a lower cost than native cloud storage, plus hands-off operations as a managed service. Now they can migrate all their workloads to the cloud and be confident that they wont have to repatriate them back on-premises due to skyrocketing costs.

Lightbits Cloud Data Platform software is already available in the AWS Marketplace and is now in preview in the eu-west, us-east, and us-west Azure regions. A Lightbits on Azure launch event is scheduled for September 29, 2023.

There are four suppliers providing block storage in the public cloud based on ephemeral storage instances: Dell (PowerFlex), Lightbits, Silk, and Volumez. They compete against the cloud providers native block storage instances and against block storage array providers, such as Pure Storage with its Cloud Block Store, which have moved their array controller software to the cloud. NeApps Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides block, file, and object storage in AWS, Azure, and the Google Cloud.

The advantage for NetApp and Pure customers is their customers having the same block storage environments on-premises and in the public clouds. The cloud block stores are based on the cloud providers native block storage and dont use ephemeral storage instances. That should give the four suppliers above both performance and cost advantages for their products but they lack the on-premises/public cloud environment consistency that NetApp and Pure provide.

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Backblaze, which uses SSDs as boot drives for its disk-based storage servers, has produced its latest SSD annualized failure rate (AFR) report. Restricting its stats to drives with more than 10,000 days of use and to statistics with a confidence interval of 1.0 percent or less gets it a table with three entries:

Its overall HDD AFR is 1.64 percent, measured across 226,309 drives and 20,201,091 drive days considerably more reliable statistics. Its SSDs are more reliable with their overall 0.60 percent AFR. These relatively early SSD AFR numbers are tending to show a so-called bathtub curve, similar to disk drives, with new drives failing more often than young and middle-aged drives and the failure rate rising as drives become older:

Report author Andy Klein writes: While the actual curve (blue line) produced by the SSD failures over each quarter is a bit lumpy, the trend line (second order polynomial) does have a definite bathtub curve look to it. The trend line is about a 70% match to the data, so we cant be too confident of the curve at this point.

Connectivity cloud company Cloudflare, building on its collaboration with Databricks, is bringing MLflow capabilities to developers building on Cloudflares serverless developer platform.Cloudflare is joining the open source MLflow project as an active contributor to bridge the gap between training models and deploying them to Cloudflares global network, where AI models can run close to end-users for a low-latency experience. MLflow is an open source platform for managing the machine learning (ML) lifecycle, created by Databricks. Cloudflares R2 is a zero egress, distributed object storage offering, allowing data teams to share live data sets and AI models with Databricks. The MLFlow deal means developers will be able to train models utilizing Databricks AI platform, then deploy those models, to Cloudflares developer platform and global network, where hyper-local inference is deployed on the edge, to complete the AI lifecycle.

Data security, manager and protector Cohesity says Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has joined its Data Security Alliance ecosystem. Cohesitys Modern Data Security and Management platform bundled with TCS Cyber Defense Suite portfolio of security services and platforms, will bring customers a unified offering. The pair claim this is designed to improve visibility across the threat landscape, secure cloud activities, and enhance their cyber resilience. They say that joint customers will benefit from TCSs domain knowledge as well as security solutions contextualized for specific industries such as finance, manufacturing, HLS, retail, utility, and more.

TheCohesity Data Security Alliancewas founded in November 2022, and contains 15 members includingBigID,Cisco,CyberArk,Mandiant,Netskope,Okta,Palo Alto Networks,PwC UK,Qualys,Securonix,ServiceNow,Splunk,TCS, andZscaler. It will go down to 14 when Cisco completes buying Splunk.

Marco Fanizzi, Commvaults SVP and GM International, and ex-VP EMEA, is leaving for a destination unknown after joining Commvault 4 years ago.

Microns Crucial consumer products unit has an X9 portable SSD in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB versions using Micron 176-layer QLC NAND, and a read speed up to 1,050MBps across its US-C interface. It has a three-year warranty period and comes in a 65 x 50mm plastic case. It is shock, vibration and drop proofup to 7.5 feet on a carpeted floor. The X9 works with Windows File History, Apple Time Machine and Acronis True Image.

Italy-based web3 decentralized storage startup Cubbit has won Leonardo, one of the worlds largest cybersecurity and defense companies with more than $14 billion in revenues, as a customer. For Leonardo, Cubbit storage means each file is encrypted, fragmented and replicated across multiple geographical locations and, in the event of an attack, it will always be fully reconstructable. The deal means Leonardo will reduce its data traffic, enabling a reduction in production and CO2 emissions. It says the distributed storage enables the construction of more efficient digital twins and its now ready for the storage of more archival data. Thats expected to grow threefold between now and 2026.

Gartner has a new Magic Quadrant; the Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure MQ. It deals with a set if suppliers who provide a standardized infrastructure stack that can run both in the public cloud and on-premises, either in datacenters or at the edge. The suppliers include public clods with versions of their software environment running on-premises, meaning Alibaba, AWS, IBM, Microsoft (Azure), Oracle, and Tencent Cloud, but not Google. A second supplier grouping consists on on-premises suppliers who have migrated their software to run in the public cloud: Huawei, Nutanix and VMware. More info here for Gartner customers. Heres the MQ diagram:

A Beyond Big Data: Hyperscale Takes Flightreport from Ocient says that two-thirds of IT Leaders (67 percent) plan to replace their data warehouse provider this year. Thats a 12% increase from last year (59 percent). 58 percent say that database and data warehouse modernization is the top data and analytics-related IT budget priority over the next 12 to 18 months. 67 percent are actively looking to switch their organizations data warehouse infrastructure. 90 percent are currently, or in the next six to 12 months, planning to remove or replace existing big data and analytics technologies. Ocient says that, for the public sector to adapt to a hyperscale data landscape, it must adopt a strategic and holistic approach with technological upgrades.Translation: convert to Ocient.

Event analytics supplier Mixpanel has released a new native connector for Googles cloud data warehouse BigQuery, making it easier for users to explore and gain insights from data. Event analytics captures every action (or event) that each user performs within a digital product, like an e-Commerce site or a ride hailing app. This granular view helps companies understand how different groups of users behave at various points during their experience. Mixpanel says this approach is faster and easier than traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools that require data to be prepared and tabulated, with BI queries coded in SQL.

European CSP OVH Cloud has announced the integration of Nvidia A100 and H100 Tensor Core GPUs into its AI offering. That will allow it to complex instances for GPU workloads, large language model ML and HPC workloads.

According to Toms Hardware reporting about a a German Computerbase forum, Samsung has a coming T9 portable SSD offering 2GBps read/write speed through its USB 3.2 gen 22 interface. Samsungs existing T7 portable drive runs at 10GBps. The T9 will come in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB variants with a 5-year warranty. Prices at French retailer PC21 are reportedly $133 for a 1TB T9 and $226 for the 2TB version although we couldnt find the drives on the PC21 website.

Swissbit has announced an N5200 Enterprise SSD in three Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S variants (5.9 mm, 9.5 mm, and 15 mm) in addition to U.2. Capacities range from 1.92 to 7.68 TB. It has a 4-lane PCIe and an NVMe 1.4 interface, with sequential data rates of up to 7,000 MB/s read and 4,200 MB/s write. Random reads and writes reach up to 1.35 million IOPS and 450,000 IOPS, respectively. Its endurance us at least 1 drive write per day over 5 years. The drive features TCG OPAL 2.01 and AES-256 encryption, Secure Boot, and Crypto Erase plus error correction and data protection mechanisms. It complies with the OCP Cloud Specification 1.0. Swissbit doesnt identify the NAND type and supplier. For project and sales inquiries, contact the Swissbit Datacenter team.

Cloud-based block storage startup Volumez has hired itself its first CRO, Jason McKinney, who most recently was worldwide VP of public cloud sales at NetApp for the last 3.5 years. He helped launch three 1st Party Services during his tenure:Azure NetApp Files, AWS FSXN, and Google Cloud Volumes Service. He was at Salesforce and VMware before NetApp. Volumez recently completed a $20 million A-round funding and hired John Blumenthal as its Chief Product Officer. Previously he was VP Data Services in HPEs storage organization. Its clear that Volumez has a sellable product, even though it is only at an A-round funding stage, and is setting up an exec team of a kind more usually seen with C-round stage startups.

Destini Nova is joining WANdisco (the soon-to-be Cirata) as the senior director of Alliances and Business Development, and will be focused on building strategic partnerships and driving business growth delivering value to customers. WANdisco says she is thrilled to be working for an organization under the dynamic leadership of Stephen Kelly again, grateful for the opportunity, and looking forward to this new journey. She comes from being director Global Alliances at Sage and is based in Seattle.

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Storage news ticker 29 Sep 2023 Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --Jason McKinney, worldwide sales executive with extensive experience in data, cloud, virtualization software and infrastructure sales, has joined Volumezas the chief revenue officer.

McKinneymost recently was worldwide vice president of public cloud sales at NetApp driving growth over the last 3.5 years, where he worked with customers to manage global cloud deployments in the cloud marketplaces, and successfully launched (3) three 1st Party Services during his tenure: Azure NetApp Files, AWS FSXN, and Google Cloud Volumes Service along with defining the solutions and GTM for Private Offers for all (3) cloud marketplaces.

His rich experience also includes sales and leadership roles at Salesforce launching and running the Social Travel ISV Experience with "Concurforce" combining travel and expense management for CFO's on the Salesforce force.com platform. AtVMware McKinney was part of the launch and movement of data center server consolidation core to virtualization accelerating the transformation of hardware to enterprise software, leading initiatives in Financial Services, Public Sector, and Healthcare Life Sciences with ISV's such as MEDITECH, SAP, and the application ecosystem. Jason scaled these partnerships with Partners and System Integrators driving large migrations anddatacenter consolidations around VMware enterprise license agreements.

"Jason's deep and varied expertise in cloud services highly complements and adds to our innovative approach to next-generation data platforms and cloud storage connecting compute with data," said Volumez CEO Amir Faintuch. "We are excited to join forces and welcome Jason to our growing executive team of high-profile cloud industry leaders who will accelerate our GTM and Sales with cloud hyperscalers, customers, and ISV's leveraging these marketplaces."

"I am looking forward to helping customers optimize their cloud commitments, leverage the marketplace, and co-author new use cases with the Volumez core value add of running applications with scale, resilience, and predictability in the cloud" said McKinney. "My proven experience in growing significant sales and leading large global diverse teams gives me a unique perspective to build momentum and revenue atVolumez mapping to customer success.

Volumez, which supports AWS and Azurecloud services, recently completed a Series A financinground of $20 million U.S. dollars, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies with previous investors Viola Ventures and Pitango, and announced John Blumenthal(also a VMware alumni) as the chief product and business officer earlier this year.

About Volumez

Volumez innovates next generation cloud-based data platforms and storagethat helps companies realize the true potential of their data. With its innovative controller-less architecture, Volumez tackles latency and scalability challenges by establishing direct Linux data paths, ensuring exceptional performance and resiliency. Through cutting-edge technology and a customer-centric approach, Volumez offers comprehensive solutions that streamline data workflows, enhance data quality, and drive informed decision-making. Discover more at Volumez.com.

Video: We are Volumez!

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SOURCE Volumez

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