DPX 4.8.1 Builds on Cyber Resilience with Proactive Early Detection

We are pleased to announce the release of Catalogic DPX 4.8.1, where we have taken a major step forward to enable our DPX customers to be amongst the best prepared to recovery from a cyberattack. This release builds on our foundational ransomware recovery and cyber resilience features to add a ground breaking new capability called DPX GuardMode, that provides proactive monitoring for early detection and notification of suspicious activity along with identifying and enabling the recovery of any affected data.

We also added many customer-driven enhancements including to DPX vStor, and we continued our theme of adding more foundational product resilience to enhance reliability and ability to respond rapidly to any vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

We also announced DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, a powerful data protection solution for Microsoft 365 and each of its components – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams – and DPX vPlus for Open VMs supports platforms such as Citrix Hypervisors, KVM, Nutanix Acropolis or AHV, Oracle VM, Proxmox, RHEV/oVirt, Scale Computing HyperCore/HC3, and XenServer, along with Amazon EC2. DPX vPlus delivers greater workload coverage for an organization’s edge and cloud data.

Let’s review the major new features of our DPX 4.8.1 product.  We’ll cover DPX vPlus in a future blog.

DPX GuardMode

With the new DPX GuardMode agent, we added the ability to change your security posture to be more proactive against ransomware posture by providing the ability to detect and get notified of suspicious behavior in your file systems and what files are potentially affected. Initially, this is for Windows only, and we’ll be adding Linux soon. To learn more, please watch this on-demand webinar, Adding Cyber Resilience to your Data Protection Strategy with Early Detection, with industry analyst Evaluator Group and Sathya Sankaran, COO of Catalogic Software.

Foundational Cyber Resilience

We migrated the DPX appliances to a different Linux distribution called AlmaLinux OS, an open-source, community-driven distribution that fills the gap left by CentOS when it discontinued stable releases. We updated the version of the distribution to the 8.5 release, which is 1:1 binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

All the JREs and Java stacks DPX uses have updated to OpenJDK 17.

These changes provide us with the ability to respond more rapidly to any future vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

DPX vStor Management Updates

vStor Updater

This new feature adds the ability to update the appliance from within the vStor UI to new versions without having to interact with the underlying operating system CLI.

Relationship Grouping

One of the areas in which our customers are often commenting is the need to configure synchronization to a secondary vStor on a per-volume basis and not having a clear overview of the health of these individual synchronization sessions.

With this release of vStor, we have added a replication applet on the vStor Dashboard, which provides a graphical of the session status. We have also added the ability to group volumes in replication groups, where each volume will inherit the groups’ replication settings and schedule.

Virtualization Proxy

We released a pre-configured VMware Proxy virtual appliance to ease the deployment of a proxy server in the correct locations for optimized data transfer of the backup data. This is for VMware environments where DPX agentless for VMware is in use.

Deploying DPX and vStor Virtual Appliances in Hyper-V

The DPX and vStor appliances can now be deployed from a mounted ISO on the Hyper-V host and are completely installer driven.

Legal Hold for Amazon S3 Object Lock

You can now add a legal hold on your data on Amazon S3 to protect this data from being overwritten, even after the associated backup job has expired.

Report Enhancements

All reports visible in the HTML5 GUI of DPX have been enhanced and now report on the full dataset of DPX.

Summary

The DPX 4.8.1 release also contains other enhancements and bug fixes of course. For further information on DPX 4.8 and earlier releases, see the What’s New in DPX 4.8 and What’s New in DPX 4.8.1 document and other resources on the DPX products page. Customers with support can access more detailed information on release notes on the Support page.  For more information on Microsoft 365 backup and Open VM backups, please see DPX vPlus.

Whether it is ransomware attacks, human error or IT outages, every business needs an affordable and reliable data protection solution like Catalogic DPX to backup and instantly recover data to ensure business continuity. Have a question or want a live demo? Contact us today!

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07/13/2022 0 Comments

How and Why DPX vPlus Displaced Bacula for Protecting Red Hat Virtualization / oVirt

After years of almost exponential growth, with many businesses virtualizing over 80% of their workloads, the virtualization industry has hit a tipping point. Now more than ever, organizations are looking at alternative hypervisors and hyperconverged infrastructure. This doesn’t mean that organizations aren’t continuing to invest in virtualization. The hypervisor market continues to grow at a solid rate. What it means is that the market is seeing a shift in how organizations are virtualizing their infrastructure.

Over the last ten years, the VMware and Hyper-V have dominated the market. But as organizations continue to virtualize more and more of their workloads, the increased cost of VMware has begun to be too much to handle for a lot of companies. In the wake of this, we are beginning to see the creation and growth of alternative open-source or niche hypervisors like Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Hypervisor, Oracle VM, KVM, and Proxmox.

The issue organizations are dealing with is the following: we cannot afford to continue to expand the VMware or Hyper-V environment, but it’s hard to trust these new, open-source hypervisors, especially when our existing backup solution is unable to protect the virtual machines.

That is where DPX vPlus comes in as a modern, enterprise-level backup solution designed specifically to protect these open VM environments. This includes support for hyperconverged infrastructure like Nutanix Acropolis and Scale Computing HC3, and more. vPlus enables agentless VM-level protection and can function as a standalone solution or integrate with your existing enterprise backup software.

As you can imagine, as the open-source hypervisor market is beginning to expand, vPlus is not the only solution out in the market for these types of environments. Another such product is Bacula. like vPlus, focuses attention on the niche market of open-sourced hypervisors. A quote straight from Bacula’s website claims to feature “the most advanced backup and recovery for Red Hat Virtualization on the planet.” Now, is this really the case? How does Bacula compare to vPlus in the RHEV/oVirt (Red Hat Virtualization) space? And how does it measure up in terms of support for all the other open-sourced hypervisor options that are out there? Does it support Amazon EC2 machines? Does it support cloud offload?

According to end-users that we have been in touch with, Bacula (for the most part) is successful in protecting the VMs. It does what it says it does. However, some have complaints about backup speeds and flexibility when it comes to allowing different ways to transfer the VM data. Bacula really only offers one transport method, and that is image-based transfers.

vPlus, on the other hand, offers multiple backup methods:

  • Image-based transfers
  • Disk attachment method
  • Changed block tracking for incremental backups
  • A new transfer method that moves VM data via SSH.

These options allow end-users more flexibility when it comes to architecture and networking.

Another specific complaint that we have heard directly from a Fortune 100 organization and one of the largest technology companies in the world (a former Bacula user who has since purchased vPlus), is that for any oVirt users, integration requires an oVirt image-io Proxy which causes bottlenecks when running simultaneous backup jobs. This prevented them from being able to run more than a couple of backup jobs at the same time. With vPlus, using a disk-attachment method to transfer the VM data, this customer has cut backup and recovery times in half.

Another area where vPlus is impressing former Bacula users is its modern, easy-to-use web UI. According to several end-users, Bacula’s UI is cumbersome and far from intuitive. We like to say a user interface is like a joke – if you have to explain it, then it’s not a good one. Because of this, most Bacula admins perform their tasks using Linux command line. However, this may be daunting for someone who is not comfortable using Linux, or knowledgeable about Bacula infrastructure.

There appears to be a steep learning curve when it comes to configuration and administration, which may be difficult to overcome for new users if, for example, your Bacula admin leaves the company or is simply on vacation. The UI for vPlus is intuitive and clean. Most of our customers request a license, install, configure, and run the product with no need for assistance from us. It’s that easy.

Finally, vPlus has the advantage in its wide range of virtual environments and backup destinations that it supports. According to its website, among open VM environments Bacula has hypervisor support for Red Hat, KVM, and ProxMox. vPlus, on the other hand, includes support for each of these hypervisors and several others. These include: Nutanix AHV, Oracle VM, Xen, Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer), OpenStack, Scale Computing HC3, and Amazon EC2.

vPlus also offers multiple options for backup destinations. This includes local file system or NFS, existing NAS devices, DataDomain appliances, cloud locations, etc. But most importantly, vPlus is able to integrate directly with a customer’s existing enterprise backup solution like Catalogic DPX, IBM Spectrum Protect, DellEMC NetWorker, and Veritas NetBackup.

In conclusion, don’t get stuck spending incredible amounts of money on your VMware or Hyper-V environment just because you don’t know there are other viable options out there. Many organizations, including large enterprise companies, are deciding to make the switch to alternative, open-sourced virtualization platforms, and turning to products like DPX vPlus to make sure that data is protected.

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to help you set things up.

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08/05/2019 0 Comments

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