Recovery Monkey

August 7, 2025August 20, 2025

Ransomware Detection in the HPE Alletra B10000 – Successfully Recover

With the R5 release of the code for the HPE Alletra MP B10000, among many other nice improvements (for example NAS and a nice new CSI driver), everyone now gets heavy-duty ransomware detection.

We have invented some new and unique ways for detecting modern ransomware that encrypts data in advanced ways (for example intermittent encryption), but most importantly, ways to detect encryption that doesn’t even look like encryption (which defeats other detection methods that rely on fixed entropy detection thresholds). See explainer here for more details on why this is crucial.

The whole point of doing this is early detection.

July 31, 2025August 4, 2025

Ransomware Detection Failure – Where does Technology Fail

This is a generic, foundational article to support related materials.

Modern ransomware that encrypts your data tries to evade detection – since that’s how the hackers maximize their payout.

The way they evade detection is by doing 2 main things:

Not encrypt everything – that evades detectors that look for massive changes in your data. So they might encrypt just a tiny bit in each file.
Encrypt in a way that doesn’t look encrypted 🙂

#2 is the interesting one and we will focus on that one in this article since that’s where most encryption detectors fail.

December 17, 2024December 18, 2024

HPE X10000 Deep Dive – Differentiation For Unstructured Data

At HPE Discover Barcelona 2024, HPE released the Alletra Storage MP X10000, the latest in our new line of shared hardware platform storage offerings.

It’s an innovative new platform specially made for unstructured data, and a long time in the making. This is HPE tech, not a partnership.

The initial workloads this solution is aimed at are anything requiring fast S3 performance, including AI workloads, data lakes, cloud native app development and high speed restore and backup.

It has several innovations such as RDMA for object, and is highly differentiated – plus, allows this kind of technology in a smaller possible starting capacity instead of only focusing on the huge side of the scale.

As usual, my aim is not to regurgitate basic information but rather to explain the true technical differentiation and get people excited about the possibilities on offer here.

The summary of the X10000 benefits are:

Disaggregation flexibility for separately expanding compute and/or capacity
Ability to scale down and not need huge capacities to get good performance
Balanced read/write performance and low latency for all workloads
Flexible, fully container-based architecture that opens up tons of possibilities for running customer code inside the storage solution.

Let’s get to it:

October 28, 2024October 29, 2024

How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees

I want to arm you with the knowledge needed to properly navigate storage efficiency guarantee contracts and arrive at a safe system sizing, with reasonable assumptions.

This is another of my generic, vendor-neutral posts aimed at helping the audience be aware of certain important things that I often see overlooked.

How does one navigate the small print around storage data reduction guarantees? What are you entitled to if the vendor misses the mark? And how do you minimize your risk when faced with certain sales teams that are determined to win even if it means huge customer risk?

Do you know your data makeup? And how it may affect a capacity guarantee? But, more importantly, how it will affect your overall efficiency?

Let’s start with a nice reductio ad absurdum example to illustrate what I mean.

May 22, 2024May 29, 2024

The Architectural Benefits of HPE Alletra MP – Plus R4 Coolness

When we first released the new HPE Alletra MP platforms, I wrote a few articles going over the benefits and how the flexible new hardware platform manifests into different “personalities” for high end block and file solutions.

This time I want to take a deeper dive into the architectural benefits of our approach and how the new R4 software for Alletra MP Block enables certain things no other vendor can come close to – plus give a taste of what may be possible in the future given the amazing flexibility of the underlying architecture (it’s a blog, I can’t provide roadmaps here).

I will cover things like fractional multi-dimensional scaling (that allows things impossible with other vendors like adding a single controller node without needing to add capacity) but also resiliency in the face of simultaneous failures that would cripple all other storage systems I’m aware of. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive coverage of everything, but hopefully enough to give you a taste.

Let’s go!