Open-Experts - The Data Storage Podcast Episode 2 cover with Todd Maxwell
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    Open-Experts – The Data Storage Podcast: Security Awareness and Data Storage Protection

    Welcome to Open-Experts – The Data Storage Podcasts, episode 2! This time, our host, Todd Maxwell, addresses critical ransomware issues to celebrate the passing of Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October. Learn how organizations, including hospitals, can effectively protect their data storage from ransomware attack consequences and maintain business continuity. Familiarize yourself with robust backup strategies using ZFS snapshots, retention plans, Open-E On- & Off-site Data Protection, High-Availability Clusters, and more. Don’t get surprised by cyberattack! Hear real stories and learn how to use Open-E JovianDSS to keep your data safe and recoverable.

    But that’s not all! Todd also highlights the Seagate Exos X24, a remarkable 24TB self-encrypting drive that complements your storage needs while enhancing security. Based on the testing and certification process performed by the Open-E QA team, he discusses and shares insights on performance metrics that can help evaluate its capabilities.

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    Okay, imagine, let’s say you leave for vacation for a week or even two, like most engineers, two weeks is just impossible, right? And when you get back to your home, you walk in and you see people living in your house. And you’re saying to yourself, “WTF!?”, you know, you are in Twilight Zone, and you realize you have squatters in your house! Now, this is a fricking nightmare, and you just can’t get them out for so many reasons, especially the crazy laws today. I know many creative ways that I would do to get them out. And I know many engineers would know how as well. Now, if this was my house. I would maybe buy a bunch of snakes and put them in there and freak them out. Or get some sleeping gas and wait till they’re asleep, and then ship them to the nearest governor’s mansion and drop them off. But I wouldn’t stand there and go through the normal process costing me a ton of money with lawyers, and police, and process, and more. Hell no, not this! No way I would do that! And this is where I’m going with this almost close analogy of squatters – it’s ransomware. Preventing ransomware from happening where they take or lock you out of your data like a squatter takes your home. Screw that! 

    So, we have a perfect solution in our Open-E JovianDSS that solves that issue. It comes free with the product, and you don’t have to pay them anymore! 

    Do you all remember in July of this year, the company that’s a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike? And it took down applications worldwide, like airlines, hospitals, and governments, and more, causing havoc! And they said it was due to an update. Yeah, I know, I know, me too, as well as most engineers, you out there, I don’t believe it as well. But besides the conspiracies, it could have been prevented, especially with our On & Off-site Data Protection feature. 

    Did you know that 34% of the state and local government organizations were hit by ransomware so far this year – 2024?

    That is insane! It’s an enormous amount of money, time, work, energy. You get the whole gamut. Hospitals were hit a lot as well, and this is the reason – they knew where to hit them because they have a high turnover in IT admins, and the ransomware squatters know this. But we have a customer who works in the hospital. And they did get hit with ransomware but not with the Open-E JovianDSS they had, as he had set it up with the On & Off-site Data Protection. Needless to say, his bosses bought him pancakes that day and a ton of beers at the bar that night. 

    We keep saying this over and over: What is your data redundancy plan?

    So, what does the On & Off-site Data Protection do, and where is it, and how to use it to save my butt from losing my job. And I want pancakes, too! Well, simply put, it is a feature in the Open-E JovianDSS GUI called Backup And Recovery. Clear as day, you can’t miss it. If you do – no pancakes, man! This is the feature that can make backups of your NAS shares, iSCSI targets, fiber channel targets, locally and remote, even if your remote site is 5,000 miles away! And even if your latency is not even 5 milliseconds, you can always set your retention plans as well. I mean, there’s a plethora of types of retention plans you can use. Maybe you’re the New York Stock Exchange, and you need this every minute or once a day. It doesn’t matter! And the retention plan has many frequency settings that you can do, so you will always be able to restore your data in a hot Tokyo minute! 

    Now, let’s say you have a physical server at your main site and then another in a remote site. And that can even be a virtual machine running the Open-E JovianDSS. And the data on the main site is critical, and you want to have a second copy to the rollout site. Now let’s assume that a ransomware attacks your data, locks up your data. Okay, very simple! Make a clone with a couple of mouse clicks and mount it, and you’re back in business! And the best part – you can reply to them with a very big smile and a capital F, capital U to take home! No tiki today, B. 

    All right. I have many customers that also replacing the monthly subscription models like Veeam with their on and off site data protection feature. So, in short, you can use this function also for many tasks at once with NAS datasets, iSCSI, and fiber channel targets like I’ve stated before. I have a customer that has 64 running tasks in every which way for source and destinations, local to local servers, local to remote, and they have never had issues of restoring their data! And they do use them a lot as they run simulations. They have to test many of their simulations and restore many to retest again. So this feature is just perfect to have for your data redundancy. 

    I want to mention that it uses async snapshots

    So, the first backup is like a full backup. Then, the next running task is only the delta difference from that full backup. So, if it’s only, let’s say, only 5MB –  only 5MB gets copied over. Now I got a customer that set up a task to backup 34 terabytes from Phoenix, Arizona to New Jersey. He knew that the first running task would take time. Now, during that time, he had to reboot the system due to some maintenance and adding another SAS HBA for an external JBOD expansion had he was doing. Now, while the system was backing up and coming back up online, the task kicked on automatically. He didn’t have to do anything. And you can also pause any task at any time. So, this feature is a must and comes free with the Open-E JovianDSS. We have videos on how to set up and use this feature. Many documents as well. One of the most questions I get are how much resources does it use? Very little! Keep in mind that the Open-E JovianDSS is ZFS-based, and snapshotting with ZFS is like, I don’t know, breathing air. It’s nothing to ZFS. That’s Dr. Bonus to your system. Go to our website and then go to Products, and select Open-E JovianDSS, then Backup Solutions. You’ll get a plethora of information. You don’t have to – if you don’t feel like reading anything, fine, be lazy like me and call us. You do get a human from our team. Trust me, we are here.

    So with that, let’s talk about adding another level of security for your storage solution, along with the On & Off-site Data Protection with using SED. That means “self-encrypted drive”. And this one would be the 24TB Seagate Exos X24, massive for storage pools. So, not only providing the SED but having the size to complement your capacity needs as well. 

    Our QA Team tested and certified the massive Seagate Exos X24. The short summary for this Seagate drive is a 3.5-inch, SAS, 7,200 RPM, 512MB buffer size. There is a slight performance difference with any SED. It’s pretty marginal, and in many cases, like I said, it’s not worth mentioning. By the way, we made it very easy to set up your SED setup in the Open-E JovianDSS. We have docs and videos on how easy it is to set this up. So don’t freak out! All the tasks done and certifications were done with a single node, HA shared cluster, and metro cluster. All tests were performed with a zpool configuration with a RAID-Z2. Z2 is like a RAID-6 for the disk groups, each having two disks for parity. Now, our tests were performed with 4K random workloads, 1MB sequential workloads. So, in the reports, we show all the charts for the following performance results. And they’re really good to look at because it gives you a gauge of what your environment could look like with these types of performances that we do the recordings and test for you. So we do a mixed random I/ performance, random read I/O, random write I/O, sequential read megabyte performance, sequential write megabyte performance. And again, to get these PDF reports, just go to our Open-E website, and you click on the Technical Support tab. You can’t miss it. And you’ll see on the left to click on the Open-E Certified Hardware Components. And there’s a lot of other things you can check out for the certifications that we’ve done.

    Okay, time for me to end this, as I have a boatload of cases to work on. We are again busy like a three-legged hamster running from two damn cats! Remember to back up no matter what! Ask yourself how fast you can restore your data. Now, go out and fix something like a real engineer. See ya!

    See ya!

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