We are excited to announce our partnership with Hyperscalers for delivering a pre-engineered, out-of-the-box appliance for data protection, migration and recovery.

We have been working together for the past 6 months to form this partnership, with Hyperscalers hard at work discovering and testing the extensive capabilities of DPX. Out of this effort Hyperscalers has developed a detailed data protection and migration whitepaper on how to utilise Hyperscalers Storage Servers with Catalogic DPX to deliver an enterprise data protection and migration solution.

Data protection and recovery has for a long time been the Achilles heel of enterprise business continuity. Stories abound of well-known brand names unable to recover from data loss or damage in a timely manner. Exacerbating this problem is the new era of rapid infrastructure flexibility across multi-cloud operations, and the accelerated functional responsiveness made possible via DevOps.

Catalogic and Hyperscalers have observed the increasing overlap of protection and migration activities generally within the industry and have understood that a critical relationship exists between the two.  Consequently, we have partnered to develop the DPX Enterprise Data Protection and Migration Appliance.  This is a pre-engineered, out-of-the-box solution for protection, migration and recovery that provides a unified range of data management, infrastructure management and risk mitigation capabilities that is unmatched by any other product in the marketplace.

By partnering with Hyperscalers we can offered pre-engineered appliances for data protection, migration and recovery. The data protection appliances scale from 78TB (1U) to 1.4PB (4U) and they are readily available with customers consuming these as building blocks. These building blocks with DPX and vStor integrated deliver next-gen data protection and migration capabilities such as flexible backup and recovery, instant access recovery to meet the most stringent RTOs and built-in ransomware protection.

Working with the team at Hyperscalers has been a pleasure.  Just like ourselves they clearly pride themselves on delivering continuous innovation, an awesome customer experience and delivering IT solutions that deliver the best total cost of ownership and value.  If you want to learn more about what Catalogic and Hyperscalers can do for your data protection, migration and recovery capabilities? Get in contact with us via info@catalogicsoftware.com

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!

At the heart of every data protection solution is the backup repository where the backup data that the protection solution is protecting resides. The ever beating heart of Catalogic DPX is vStor, a virtual storage appliance. The vStor backup repository is a software-defined, flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players.

DPX vStor Backup Repository Architecture

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support.

Figure 1. DPX vStor Architecture

vStor can be configured to meet your needs – your choice of physical or virtual servers, any form of block storage and all the leading cloud storage providers, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. DPX vStor Provides Choice of Server and Storage

With DPX vStor, you can build different backup targets to meet your performance needs. For example, a single vStor virtual appliance to support a ROBO or small environment, or a high-performance vStor built on all-flash storage for your most critical workloads. For backups to and recoveries from a vStor server, both block backups and agentless backups are fully supported.

Once your backup data is safe and sound in the vStor, you then have a choice of options for enabling DR and archive. You can replicate the content to a secondary vStor, and offload to tape or to cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob storage, Backblaze B2, Cloudian, Scality, and MinIO.

Ransomware Protection with vStor and S3 Object Lock

We are all aware ransomware is a growing industry with it being nearly impossible to go a day without seeing an attack impact a business and hit the news headlines. So what can you do?
Please review and follow these recommendations on how to reduce risk from ransomware attacks for ensuring you have integrated ransomware protection and recovery via Catalogic DPX.

With DPX vStor, backups are stored as immutable snapshots and can be offloaded as offline, air-gapped copies of backups. For copies going to cloud object storage, you can enable S3 Object Lock meaning you can store your backup data sets using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model.

S3 Object Lock can prevent your backup data from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. You can use S3 Object Lock to help meet regulatory requirements that require WORM storage, or to simply add another layer of protection against unauthorized changes and deletion.

Support for S3 Object Lock is provided for leading cloud storage providers including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and more. It’s a really simple process to configure:

• Run agentless or agent based backups to vStor
• vStor offloads to S3 object storage
• S3 Object lock configured within DPX prevents ransomware from tampering with your backup data

Immutable copies can then be restored from the cloud storage in the event of a cyber-attack.

Figure 3. DPX vStor Supports S3 Object Lock

DPX vStor Deployment and Management

Deploying DPX vStor is very slick and simple. Once your DPX data protection solution has been correctly architected and sized you can deploy your vStor in a few minutes and start backing up your data into the vStor.

Day to day management has been designed to be as easy as possible via the vStor user interface which shows the following via the interactive dashboard:

• vStor health status
• Capacity allocated and free
• Compression ratio
• Deduplication ratio
• Backed up data history for the last day, week or month
• Backup storage trend for the last day, week or month
• Replication session details per source volume
• Type of shared volumes
• Disks in use

Figure 4. DPX vStor Day to Day Management

Your Next Data Protection Step

Want to learn more about DPX data protection and the vStor backup repository? Please contact us by form or email and we can quickly provide a product demonstration, our guaranteed low pricing, and a free proof of concept.

Ransomware is a growing threat that continues to wreak havoc within businesses as cybercriminals constantly innovate in terms of how they are executing attacks. One of the latest trends being seen is that attackers are proactively targeting and removing backup data. This is because if they encrypt or remove an organization’s backup data, then they have significantly enhanced the likelihood of the ransom being paid.

Cybercriminals love nothing more than infiltrating a network, accessing your data, and encrypting it so it can no longer be accessed until a ransom is paid. Typically, the longer the data is encrypted and unavailable, the larger the financial impact. These criminals may even sell the data outright.

Attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. A ransomware attack study from Ivanti found that of 1,000 enterprises IT professionals across the globe, 58% had worked for organizations that had suffered a ransomware attack in the last year! Sadly, cybercriminals have become an almost unstoppable force.

If you are a software vendor like us, you need to ensure you have very robust security policies and procedures in place to prevent hackers from gaining access to code. Because if they do, every single customer using your software is then at risk of attack.

One of the largest global ransomware attacks to date happened to Kaseya, which provides IT management software for MSPs. Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management tool was used as an attack vector to inject ransomware into over a thousand systems via thirty-plus MSPs. This is not the first time this type of supply chain attack has taken place with SolarWinds, having a similar scenario unfolded last year.

We are living in a data-driven age. Security is a process that needs to be implemented with policies in place to ensure that users, networks, and devices are as protected as possible. Part of the security process for your data should involve a reliable and tested data protection solution that will support your organization in recovering your data quickly if it is compromised.

When choosing the fortress for your data, there are five key capabilities your data protection solution and IT team needs to provide to shield, protect, survive and recover from a ransomware attack:

• Ensure redundant backups
  Backup is everything and it is of the highest priority to ensure your organization’s backups can be counted on to recover lost data. The 3-2-1 backup rule is a great strategy for data protection. It calls for three (3) copies of data, on two (2) different storage media types, with one (1) of the copies offsite or in the cloud. With backups to recover from and the offsite copy that ransomware cannot reach, this strategy is good insurance against bad actors stealing data. The 3-2-1-1 rule adds at least one backup copy verified was not locked or corrupted that can be recovered. 3 copies, 2 media, 1 offsite, and 1 verified recoverable. Catalogic DPX is the perfect product to enable 3-2-1-1.

• Granular recovery points
  Backup is must be completed every day. Sometimes things get in the way and a backup might be missed occasionally. But if you are only backing up once per week and ransomware strikes toward the end of the week, the company could lose many days of data. Backups and snapshots must run regularly, or point-in-time copies of data are taken as often as possible. This helps an organization recover as close as possible to the time the data was encrypted or damaged by ransomware.
  Ransomware attackers are analyzing behavior and traffic waiting for the best time to strike. Sometimes attackers are present in the network and have access after recovery, allowing them to attack again. Take this into consideration and set longer retention periods than your typical defaults of  30, 60, or 90 days.

• Air-Gapped and Immutable backups
  If your backups reside on the same network or the same storage system as your production data resides, they are vulnerable to attack also. Cybercriminals have gotten more sophisticated and one of the first items they do is to search for and remove all your backups so that no data recovery is possible. Having backups air-gapped in the cloud or on tape that the ransomware attacker cannot easily reach, helps ensures that your data is recoverable. Further, if your backup data or data snapshots are immutable or locked from changes, they can be used to rapidly recover your data in case ransomware encrypts your primary data.

• Application-aware backup
  Applications require additional consideration if they use a database and the data is protected only by those files themselves. When ransomware hits, it takes several steps to recover applications. Application-aware backup is important as it defends application metadata and ensures that the application servers can be recovered. Conduct application recovery verification tests on a regular basis to stay in the know and confirming that the data and applications can be restored.

• Reporting can predict disaster ahead
  It is typical for incremental data backup to contain fairly small changes between full backup cycles. One big tip-off when ransomware hits (with data encrypted) is that an incremental backup suddenly becomes the size of a full backup. Modern data protection products can track anomalies and report if backup sizes are unexpectedly much larger and alert the backup/security administrator. This is very helpful in identifying an attack in progress, and also sets the point in time from which rapid data recovery can commence.

Data Protection is the last line of defense when it comes to ransomware attacks. Ensure that you have a data protection fortress-like Catalogic DPX that is ransomware recovery ready.  If you are interested in learning more about how Catalogic can assist you in implementing your data protection fortress to ensure recovery from ransomware attacks, please contact us and also watch our recent webinar Protect and Recover Your Data from Ransomware Attacks.