With a longstanding relationship with Veeam as a TAP and CSP partner, StoneFly offers backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions for mission-critical on-premises, cloud, and virtual workloads. Tested and verified by Veeam, StoneFly’s Veeam-ready solutions guarantee near-zero RTPOs, and deliver the best ransomware protection capabilities at an affordable price point.
By using Veeam availability suite version 10 with StoneFly’s solutions, organizations get:
- All the backup, replication, and restore features of Veeam
- Highly scalable, secure, and high availability storage from StoneFly
- Ability to connect to the cloud and store data, Veeam backup files, snapshots, and replicas.
- Built-in data protection features that ensure your Veeam backup files, snapshots, and replicas are safe from ransomware attacks, hackers, etc.
- Preconfigured storage optimization capabilities that facilitate effective usage of available storage capacity hence improving TCOs and ROIs.
In this blog post, we explore the ransomware-protection capabilities that most backup and DR systems do not have; but are included as standard features in StoneFly’s Veeam-ready backup and DR solution.
Ransomware Protection Challenges with Traditional Backup & DR
Traditional backup and DR appliances offer standard backup and restore capabilities but are filled with vulnerabilities that make them inadequate for effective ransomware protection. Additionally, these “solutions” are typically expensive – requiring users to purchase third-party add-ons so they can deliver effective ransomware protection. In other words, with traditional backup and DR solutions not-only do you get insufficient ransomware protection but you also end up paying more and getting less in return.
Here are some of the essential features that legacy backup and DR systems lack:
No Air-Gap Repositories for Advanced Ransomware Protection
Most mainstream backup software such as Commvault, Rubrik, Veritas, Veeam, etc. are Windows-based.
This implies that while these software offer great features to protect your critical workloads, the OS that they are deployed on is vulnerable; and the vulnerabilities are well-known. Ransomware are programmed to exploit these features and infiltrate traditional backup servers and host appliances.
The only solution to this challenge is air-gapped repositories. However, traditional backup and DR appliances do not come equipped with air-gap features; making them vulnerable to ransomware that targets Windows-based environments.
No Built-in WORM, S3 Object Lockdown, or Immutable Snapshots – Vulnerable to Ransomware Attacks
In order to protect critical workloads from being overwritten, deleted, or getting maliciously encrypted, repositories such as Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) are a must. Additionally, features like S3 object lockdown deliver the same capabilities but for S3 object volumes. And immutable snapshots allow you to make sure you have unchangeable volume snapshots to use for data recovery in the event of a disaster.
The combination of these three features deliver a highly secure storage fit to protect your critical workloads, and backup data.
However, traditional backup and DR systems do not offer these features as standard. Usually, they are offered as an add-on or customers need to purchase them from third party service providers.
In both cases, you have to spend extra than you originally did to purchase the backup and DR system.
No Preconfigured Storage Optimization Features – Inefficient Storage Space Consumption
In addition to the lack of isolated air-gap repositories, and secure WORM volumes, traditional backup and DR also lack features that enhance storage space consumption.
This means that they end up using more storage resources than necessary, leading to additional hardware and maintenance costs. In other words, if you choose to go with traditional backup and DR systems, the TCOs and ROIs will not look good and you will end up with a lot unused or idle storage.
While these three are not the only challenges with traditional backup and DR systems, they are the most common and important ones. Now that we know what’s lacking in traditional backup and DR systems, let’s look at the complete turnkey backup and DR that StoneFly and Veeam deliver.
How StoneFly and Veeam Overcome Ransomware Protection Challenges
StoneFly’s Veeam-ready backup and DR solution (DR365V) is trusted by US government departments, US Navy, and market leaders across the globe to protect mission-critical workloads from ransomware attacks.
The DR365V combines Veeam’s backup, replication, and restore capabilities with StoneFly’s patented 8th gen storage virtualization software (SCVM) to deliver a complete turnkey hyperconverged backup and DR appliance that overcomes ransomware protection challenges seamlessly and offers the best TCO and ROI in the market.
Here are some of the features that set DR365V apart from traditional backup and DR, and make it the best choice to protect critical workloads from ransomware attacks:
Note: StoneFly DR365V comes preconfigured with StoneFly SCVM. The following are SCVM features and are available in all StoneFly HCI and backup and DR appliances with SCVM.
Air-Gapped Vault™ & Air-Gapped Fabric™ – Isolated, Secure, & Detachable Volumes
Air-gapped Vault™ are isolated, detachable volumes that can be turned “on” or “off” as per user defined policies. These volumes can be deployed on DR365V locally, or on cloud repositories. As these volumes are “off” by default and only turned on to store backups, snapshots, replicas, and critical workloads, ransomware attacks cannot get to the data stored in them.
In the event of a ransomware attack, users can recover their critical volumes using the data stored in air-gapped repositories and restore operations within minutes; minimizing data loss, reducing downtime, and effectively ensuring business continuity.
Air-Gapped Fabric™ combines data management for all deployed Air-Gapped Vaults, whether they are deployed locally on DR365V or in the cloud – making management and control seamless, efficient, and simpler for the storage administrator.
Secure WORM, S3 Object Lockdown, and Immutable Snapshots – Ransomware-Proof Data Storage & Protection
The DR365V offers Write-Once Read-Many (WORM), S3 object lockdown and immutable snapshots as standard features.
Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) Volumes in DR365V
The DR365V enables users to provision WORM volumes on the appliance or in the cloud of their choice. These target immutable storage repositories only allow users to read and not edit or delete the data stored in these volumes. This ability also in turn protects, the data stored in these volumes, from ransomware attacks that look to overwrite or maliciously encrypt data.
The backup and DR appliance also facilitates users to define policies which control how long the data stored in the WORM volumes cannot be edited or deleted – giving users complete control over their mission-critical assets.
S3 Object Lockdown in DR365V
DR365V comes with standard support for local S3 volumes and AWS S3 cloud. Additionally, storage administrators can set up policies to “lock” object storage volumes.
S3 object lockdown, similar to WORM volumes, only allow read-access. This implies that the object data stored in “locked” volumes cannot be edited, deleted, or overwritten for a specified period of time.
With S3 object lockdown feature, StoneFly customers can leverage DR365V to provision ransomware-proof, local and/or cloud, object volumes.
Immutable Snapshots Feature in DR365V
In addition to highly secure storage repositories, the DR365V also offers immutable delta-based snapshots as a standard feature. With this feature, users can capture and store un-editable volume snapshots to use for restore in the event of a disaster.
Furthermore, the snapshots are delta-based (or changed-based). Delta-based snapshots only create snapshots of the changes rather than redoing the entire volume over and over again. This makes the snapshot process much faster, and efficient in terms of storage space consumption.
In other words, in-comparison to legacy backup and DR systems, not-only are DR365V’s snapshots more secure but also much faster and storage-space friendly.
Effective Storage Space Utilization with Built-in Storage Optimization Features
Besides highly secure ransomware-proof repositories and data protection capabilities, the DR365V also comes equipped with storage optimization features. By leveraging these built-in features, DR365V users can effectively use available storage space, improve Total Cost of Ownership (TCOs) and get the best Return on Investments (ROIs) in the market.
The storage optimization features included in DR365V are:
Deduplication for SAN, NAS, and S3 Object Volumes
With support for highspeed system memory and multi-core Xeon/AMD processors, the DR365V can support deduplication ratios up to 100x*. This feature enables DR365V users to effectively reduce their data footprints and utilize available storage space to its fullest capacity.
*Deduplication ratios depend on configured DR365V hardware specifications.
Thin Provisioning with Space Reclamation
Leverage the built-in thin provisioning feature to reclaim unused storage space and quickly provision storage resources for applications, workloads, and projects that need them.
Automated Tiering for NAS Volumes
With the preinstalled SCVM software, DR365V users can leverage NVMe SSDs, and SAS drives to designate high performance and capacity tiers – and then define policies that automate transfers of hot tier and cold tier data.
By using automated tiering, StoneFly customers simplify and automate data management and improve ROIs by fully utilizing the hardware.
FlashCache™ – Frontend NVMe SSD Caching
DR365V supports high performance NVMe SSDs which can be configured as frontend flash cache using StoneFly SCVM. By setting up frontend cache, users can improve IOPS for hot tier workloads – in turn improving performance and productivity.
Summary
When it comes to ransomware-protection, traditional backup and DR, despite being expensive, don’t provide adequate data protection. Ransomware attacks still find a way to not only infect original copies but also backups, snapshots, and replicas.
The ransomware-protection features that aren’t supported in most mainstream backup and DR systems, and included as standard in StoneFly DR365V include:
- Air-gap repositories: Highly secure, isolated, and detachable target storage repositories (local and/or cloud)
- Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) – Immutable target storage repositories (local and/or cloud)
- S3 Object Lockdown – Unchangeable object storage volumes (local and/or cloud)
- Immutable Delta-Based Snapshots
In addition to lacking necessary data protection features, legacy backup and DR systems add to the cost by not providing built-in storage optimization capabilities. Alternatively, StoneFly DR365V Veeam-ready backup and DR appliance comes preconfigured with all of the above features and more.
In other words, whether its ransomware-protection, optimized storage consumption, better TCOs and ROIs, or all of the above, StoneFly DR365V is clearly the best backup and DR solution in the market.
Schedule a Demo for StoneFly DR365V Today & Get Powerful Ransomware-Protection for Your Critical Workloads
Email: sales@staging.stonefly.com
Phone: +1 510 265-1616
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Relevant Resources
Watch video: DR365V – Veeam-ready backup and DR appliance
Read newsletter: StoneFly DR365V now verified as Veeam ready repository and object
DR365V as Veeam-ready repository: Veeam portal link
DR365V as Veeam-ready object: Veeam portal link
