Dimitris | Recovery Monkey

July 25, 2023April 8, 2025

HPE Ransomware Detection and Recovery in Zerto 10: Sophistication that Works

Ransomware seems to be at the forefront of many discussions today, and for good reason: The ransomware gangs make a ton of money by causing massive problems to businesses that are in turn losing billions because of this – but most importantly, losing time.

So eventually, like for anything that’s a problem, people tried to find solutions.

The challenge becomes finding what solutions truly address the problem in a realistic way instead of being mostly marketing in order to show a vendor isn’t behind in this area.

Some of you may remember the awesome Chrysler ads with Ricardo Montalban talking about “rich Corinthian Leather”. There is no such thing, the leather came from New Jersey. Corinth in Greece was never known for its prowess in leather anything – but the name sounded cool and different, so marketing went with it, as is their idiom. I’ll explain how HPE’s Zerto ransomware detection & recovery is truly useful in both detecting modern ransomware and rapidly recovering with a tight RPO. I’ll also show which types of protection are more like Corinthian Leather 🙂

A good example of Corinthian Leather: “Immutable Snapshots”. Practically every serious storage system from the major vendors has this technology, which mostly means locking snaps so that even if ransomware has infected the backup system (and therefore has the permissions to delete snaps, which is the least of the many things ransomware will try and do), the storage system won’t allow the deletion to happen.

Techniques like locking snapshots are, at best, a supplemental form of defense. Some ransomware indeed tries to delete snaps before the hackers demand the ransom – but they have already been encrypting your data for months, so your snaps are also infected…

So if you can’t detect, with accuracy, when encryption started happening, you have no defense and no safe recovery point.

To summarize: Aside from prevention, what’s most useful if you have been infected is:

Real-time detection but also…
…the ability to detect modern kinds of ransomware that fool methods like standard Shannon entropy detection (for example, encryption that results in compressible data) but also…
…the ability to very quickly recover, and with a minimal loss of data (tight RPO and RTO) – not in hours/days but seconds/minutes. Time is money and all that.

Let’s get started:

April 13, 2023April 19, 2023

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4^th, 2023 announcements from HPE Storage was the scale-out HPE GreenLake for File Storage.

For the foundational piece explaining the common hardware between the various offerings please go here. For the Block storage piece, here.

The new HPE File offering is based on the HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware, and uses a common management interface for both File and Block, providing a seamless, centralized, multiprotocol management experience.

For the people that like looking at boxes, a small one would look like this:

A Small HPE GreenLake for File Storage System – Compute Separate from Capacity

April 6, 2023April 13, 2023

The New HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Powered by Alletra Storage MP.

Now that we have the basic Alletra Storage MP hardware architecture details explained, what is the new Block storage offering from HPE?

It is the next evolution of HPE storage, combining novel approaches with certain tried-and-true elements and concepts from our existing systems.

For the people that love looking at boxes, here’s a photo of one of the new systems.

Bezel designers are the unsung heroes of storage. Without them everything would look the same.

April 6, 2023April 6, 2023

The New HPE Alletra Storage MP – The Era of Standardization

There’s the adage that variety is the spice of life, but, as usual, too much of anything can be a challenge.

Take, for example, storage hardware at any company that has multiple storage portfolio offerings.

Almost always, the hardware is different between the various offerings, sometimes extremely so. Not just in performance or capacity, but also in quality and reliability. And in many cases, the hardware is so dramatically different that there can be absolutely no sharing – the drives are different, the controllers are different, the chassis are different, the HBAs… maybe even the screws 😊 (lately I have been trying to keep things generic and not name names, but a prime example is Pure – FlashBlade is incredibly different vs FlashArray//X which is incredibly different vs FlashArray//C which is incredibly different vs FlashArray//XL).

At HPE we are taking major steps to standardize the storage solution hardware to provide a better customer experience.

In this blog I will discuss the new hardware and briefly touch upon the new software offerings that will all run on that same hardware – as usual, I will try to provide information and insights that may not always be found in official announcements or the product pages.