Category: General

General category for posts

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Ransomware Detection in the HPE Alletra B10000 – Successfully Recover”
Posted on

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Continue reading “Ransomware Detection Failure – Where does Technology Fail”
Posted on

How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees

beancounter

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.

Continue reading “How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees”
Posted on

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:

Continue reading “HPE Ransomware Detection and Recovery in Zerto 10: Sophistication that Works”
Posted on

HPE GreenLake for File Storage

A critical part of the recent April 4th, 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
Continue reading “HPE GreenLake for File Storage”
Posted on

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

The joy of blocks

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.
Continue reading “The New HPE GreenLake for Block Storage – Powered by Alletra Storage MP.”
Posted on

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.

Continue reading “The New HPE Alletra Storage MP – The Era of Standardization”
Posted on

Beware of Cloud Sizing Tools and avoid Reliability Angst

Some time ago I wrote about the dangers of taking certain things for granted with new technologies.

This time I wanted to use a more specific enterprise application example to show that customers need to be extra careful when comparing solutions, especially for mission-critical apps.

Sometimes being too high-level means missing the unspeakable horrors lurking under the covers. And ignorance doesn’t mean bliss… just nasty surprises.

To summarize: Avoid bait-and-switch so you avoid surprise costs and pain.

  • Ensure all components in any sizing tools reflect your business requirements.
  • The simpler the infrastructure, the more reliable. If one must do things like stripe across many volumes in order to get decent performance even for medium-sized solutions, then that may be a warning sign that the solution is lacking.
  • Ensure all the underlying components in any pricing you see would fit your company’s mission-critical needs. For instance – what reliability and resiliency are the storage components rated for? And is that sufficient for your needs?
  • Ensure you are accounting for the right number of systems (Production-spec vs non, times number of applications, etc). This can quickly add up with certain apps.

Continue reading “Beware of Cloud Sizing Tools and avoid Reliability Angst”

Posted on

HPE Alletra 9000 – Primera Evolved

I’m excited to announce that the evolution of the HPE Primera (which was the evolution of 3PAR) is now available.

It’s called the HPE Alletra 9000 and is the mission-critical Tier-0 complement to the Tier-1 Alletra 6000 (which in turn is the evolution of Nimble).

It retains the rich feature set of Primera and the 100% uptime guarantee. The main enhancement vs Primera is the increased speeds, and the fact that all the performance is possible in just a 4U configuration, making it the most performance-dense full-feature Tier 0 system in the world (by far). It is managed via the HPE Data Services Cloud Console.

A welcome enhancement (that is also coming to Primera) is that of Active Peer Persistence, which allows a LUN to be simultaneously read from and written to from two sites synchronously replicating. This means that each site can do local writes to a sync replicated LUN without the hosts needing to cross the network to the other site.

Continue reading “HPE Alletra 9000 – Primera Evolved”
Posted on

HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved

HPE Alletra

I’m very excited to announce that the evolution of HPE Nimble Storage is now available.

The new line is called Alletra 6000, and is completely interoperable with Nimble and manageable both from its own GUI/CLI/API and Data Services Cloud Console. For the Alletra 9000 (the evolution of Primera) there will be a separate post.

All the usual goodies of Nimble are still there (6-nines guaranteed uptime, fancy direct-to-L3 support, InfoSight with infrastructure AI recommendations, 100% headroom even if running on one controller, SCM cache, Triple+ RAID, Cascade Multistage Checksums etc). What’s different is mostly the vastly increased speeds in real-world workloads, and the shorter form factor.

Continue reading “HPE Alletra 6000 – Nimble Evolved”
Posted on

The Loss of Important Knowledge and Acumen Through Perceived Commoditization

I posit that we now have a whole new class of consumer that is completely oblivious to certain hitherto fundamental concepts – and this can lead to poor business decisions and overall sub-optimal execution and results.

I got the idea after a discussion with an ex colleague (that’s now working for a cloud vendor) where he proudly proclaimed that infrastructure is unimportant and uninteresting.

I’ll start generically and shift to IT. The generic aspect of this problem is very interesting, since it’s lowering quality in all sorts of fields.

And never forget: Just because something is widely and easily available doesn’t mean it’s better. It simply means that more people have access to it.

Continue reading “The Loss of Important Knowledge and Acumen Through Perceived Commoditization”

Posted on

Will your Infrastructure Survive if you Disappear?

This one is dedicated to an old friend that’s been asking me to write about certain technologies like a very specific filesystem and whether it should be used as the basis for enterprise storage.

He loves using open source stuff for business, mostly to save money, but also for the control it affords and the sheer pleasure of tinkering (and, I suspect, a modicum of masochistic proclivity).

This isn’t a post against open source (if nothing else, that would be utterly hypocritical since most commercial stuff is at least partially based on open source software).

It’s more about risk mitigation and TCO.

Continue reading “Will your Infrastructure Survive if you Disappear?”

Posted on

Progress Needs Trailblazers

I got the idea for this stream-of-consciousness (and possibly too obvious) post after reading some comments regarding new ways to do high speed I/O. Not something boring like faster media or protocols, but rather far more exotic approaches that require drastically rewriting applications to get the maximum benefits of radically different architectures.

The comments, in essence, stated that such advancements would be an utter waste of time since 99% of customers have absolutely no need for such exotica, but rather just need cheap, easy, reliable stuff, and can barely afford to buy infrastructure to begin with, let alone custom-code applications to get every last microsecond of latency out of gear.

Continue reading “Progress Needs Trailblazers”