The comprehensive backup and recovery stack allowed Fatland’s
production processing systems to snap back to use after only a few hours, but the value of intelligent and increasingly hybrid storage approaches go much further to assure the ongoing integrity of both systems -- and business outcomes.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to explain how vertically integrated IT infrastructure and mirrored data strategies can prevent data
loss and business downtime are Terje Wester,
the CEO at Fatland, based in
Norway, and Patrick
Osborne, Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and
Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Data and security integration are, in
fact, part of the architecture. Security is not a separate category or a chunk that
you bolt on later.
On Saturday, we had no production. So, Saturday and Sunday for us were the days to work on and solve the problem. We contacted HPE for consultants, to determine what to do. They came over from Oslo on Sunday, and from Sunday afternoon to early Monday morning we recovered everything.
Gardner: In the case of the cryptovirus, did the
virus not encrypt the data at all, or was it encrypted but you were able to
snap back to the encryption-free copies of the data fast?
Gardner: And that gets back to the idea that
strategic data protection is the gift that keeps giving. As more systems are
integrated, the more data analysis can be done, signatures patterns shared with
other organizations, and you can ultimately become predictive rather than
reactive.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Terje, getting all of your systems back
up in a few hours after an aggressive ransomware attack in 2017 probably
wasn’t what first drove you to have a comprehensive backup and recovery capability. What were the early drivers that led you to put in a more modern
approach to data lifecycle management?
Wester: First of all, we have HPE end-to-end at
Fatland. We have four production sites. At one production site we have our servers.
We are running a meat business, doing everything from slaughtering to processing
and packing. We deal with the farmers; we deal with the end customers. It’s really
important to have good IT systems, also safe systems.
 |
| Wester |
When we last invested in these
HPE systems, we wanted something that was in front of the line, which was safe,
because the uptime in the company is so important. Our IT people had the
freedom to choose what they thought was the best solution for us. And HPE was the
answer. We tested that really hard on this ransomware episode we had in
September.
Gardner: Patrick, are you finding in the
marketplace that people have primary reasons for
getting into a comprehensive data protection mode? It can become a gift that
keeps giving.
Osborne: A lot of our customers are now focusing
on security. It’s definitely top of mind. What we are trying to provide is more
of an integrated approach, so it’s not a secondary or an afterthought that you
bolt on.
Whether it’s our server products, with silicon root of trust, or our storage products, with things like
we have done for Fatland such as Recovery Manager Central (RMC),
or with our integrated offerings such as our hyper-converged infrastructure
(HCI) product line -- the theme is the same. What we are trying to
weave through this is that data protection and availability are an endemic
piece of the architecture. You get it on day one when you move to a modernized
architecture, as opposed to running into a ransomware or an availability issue and
then having to re-architect after-the-fact.
What we are trying to do with
a number of customers is, from day one, when you renew your infrastructure, it
has all of this availability and security built in. That’s one of the biggest
things that we see, that’s helpful for customers these days.
Osborne: Exactly.
Gardner: Terje, tell us a about the .NM4
crypto virus. In 2017, this hit a lot of people. Some were out for days.
What happened when this hit your organization?
Rapid response, recovery
Wester: These people were trying to attack us.
They started to visit our servers and got in on a Thursday. They worked until that
Friday night and found an opening. This was something that happened in the
middle of the night and they closed down the servers. They put in this
ransomware, so that closed down everything.
On Saturday, we had no production. So, Saturday and Sunday for us were the days to work on and solve the problem. We contacted HPE for consultants, to determine what to do. They came over from Oslo on Sunday, and from Sunday afternoon to early Monday morning we recovered everything.
On Monday morning we started
up, I think, only about 30 minutes behind schedule and the business was
running. That was extremely important for us. We have live animals coming in on
Sunday to be slaughtered on Monday. We have rapid processing. Christmas was around
the corner and everything that we produce is important every day. The quick
recovery was really important for us.
Gardner: You are an older, family-run organization, dating back to 1892. So, you have a very strong brand to protect.
On
Monday morning we started up only 30 minutes behind schedule and the
business was running. That was extremely important to us. The quick
recovery was really important.
Wester: That’s right, yes.
Gardner: You don’t want to erode that brand. People
want to continue to hold the trust they have had in you for 125 years.
Wester: They do. The farmers have been calling
us for slaughtering of their cattle for generations. We have the typical
supermarket chains in Norway as our main customers. We have a big daily
turnover, especially in September through October, when all the lambs are
coming in. It’s just a busy period and everybody trusts that we should work for
them every day, and that’s our goal, too.
Gardner: Patrick, what was it about the HPE
approach, the Recovery Manager Central and StoreOnce, that prevented
the ransomware attack, in this case, from causing the significant downtime that
we saw in other organizations?
Osborne: One of the important things to focus on
is that in the case of Fatland it’s not so much the money that you would have had
to pay for the ransomware, it’s the downtime. That is key.
 |
| Osborne |
Using our architecture, you
can take application or data-specific point-in-time copies of the data that’s
critical -- either mission-critical or business-critical -- at a very granular
level. You can orchestrate that, and then send that all off to a secondary
system. That way you have an additional layer of security.
What we announced in November 2017 at Discover in Madrid is
the ability to go even further beyond that and send an additional copy to the
cloud. At all layers of the infrastructure, you will be able to encrypt that
data. We designed the system around not so much backup -- but to be able to restore
quickly.
The goal is to provide a
very aggressive recovery time objective (RTO) in a very granular recovery point
objective. So, when a team like Terje’s at Fatland recognizes that they have a
breach, you can mitigate that, essentially staunch the issue, and be able to
rapidly recover from a well-known set of data that wasn’t compromised.
For us it’s all about architecting
to rapidly recover, of making that RTO as quickly as possible. And we see a lot
of older architectures where you have a primary storage solution that has all of
your data on it and then not a really good backup infrastructure.
What turned into two days of
disruption for Fatland could have been many more days, if not weeks, in older
infrastructure. We really just are focused on mitigation of RTO.
Osborne: When we do this at the storage layer,
we are able to take copies of that data and then move it off to a secondary system,
or even a tertiary system. You then have a well-known copy of that data before
it’s been encrypted. You are able to roll back to a point in time in your infrastructure
before that data has been compromised, and then we can actually go a step
further.
Some of the techniques allow you to have encryption on your
primary storage. That usually helps if you are changing disk drives and whatnot.
It’s from a security perspective. Then we are actually able to encrypt again at
the data level on secondary storage. In that case, you have a secure piece of
the infrastructure with data that's already been encrypted at a well-known
point in time, and you are able to recover. That really helps out a lot.
Gardner: So, their encryption couldn't get past
your encryption?
Osborne: Yes.
Gardner: The other nice thing about this rapid
recovery approach is that it doesn't have to be a ransomware or a virus or even
a security issue. It could be a natural disaster; it could be some human error.
What's important is the business continuity.
Now that you have been through the ransomware attack, how
is your confidence in always being up and running and staying in business in
general, Terje?
Business continuity bonus
Wester: We had been discussing this quite a lot
before this ransomware issue. We established better backup systems, but now we
are looking into extending them even more, to have another system that can run
from the minute the main servers are down. We have a robotized system picking
out meat for the supermarket chains 24x7, and when their main server stops,
something should be able to take over and run the business. So, within a very
short time we will also have that solution in place, with good help from HPE.
Gardner: Patrick, not that long ago the
technology to do this may have been there, but the costs were prohibitive. The
network and latency and issues were prohibitive. What's happened in the past
several years that allows you to go to a company such as Fatland and basically
get them close to 99.9999 percent availability across the board?
Osborne: In the past, you had customers with a
preferred vendor for servers, a preferred vendor for networking, and another
preferred vendor for storage. That azimuth is changing to a vertically oriented stack. So, when Terje has a set of applications or business needs, we are able
to, as a portfolio company, bring together that whole stack.
In the past, the customer was the integrator, and the cost
was in bringing many, many different disparate solutions together. They would
act as the integrator. That was probably the largest cost back in the day.
We're
now bringing together something that's vertically oriented and has
security and data protection availability throughout the stack. At the
end of the day it's a business enabler for a business of any size.
Now, we’re bringing together something that's more
vertically oriented and that has security and data protection availability
throughout the stack. We’re making these techniques and levels of availability
for customers of any size, where IT is not really their core competency. At the
end of day, it's a business enabler, right?
Wester: Right, absolutely.
Osborne: The second piece from a networking
perspective is that very large and low-cost bandwidth has definitely changed
the game in terms of being able to move data, replicate data from on-premise,
even off-premise to the cloud, that's certainly been an enabler as well.
Gardner: We are seeing mirroring of entire data
centers in amazing amounts of time.
Also, you have an integrated stack approach, with HPE
focused on security engineered in, across the board, from the silicon up. What
are some of the newer technologies that we can expect to see that further
increases higher availability, lower risk and lower cost?
Shared signature knowledge
Osborne: Terje's team had cryptovirus on-premise,
a breach with a number of different signatures. We are now focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) for the data center. So, taking the human factor out of it to
help recognize the problems faster.
So, if they have a breach, and that has certain signatures found
in the infrastructure, we can take that and apply that knowledge to other
customers. And likewise, they may have some things that happened to them that
can benefit Fatland as well.
Using machine learning techniques,
we have a number of things that we have brought to the table for what we call
predictive analytics in the data center. So HPE Aruba on
the networking side has a number of capabilities, too.
We are bringing InfoSight, which is our
predictive analytics for storage, and extending that to other parts of the
infrastructure. So, servers, networking, and storage. You can start to see signatures
in more places.
The General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has
been implemented, and there are some high fines. You have
to report within 72 hours. So, anything you can do to take the human factor out
of this, from a technology perspective is a win for everyone, and we have a big
investment in that.
Terje, the level of confidence that you have seems to be
high, it's perhaps going to get higher. What other recommendations might you
have for other organizations that are thinking about this? Did it turn out to
be a good investment, and what sort of precautions might you have for others if
they haven't done this already?
Communication is key
Wester: Data itself is not part of our core
business. But communication is. It is extremely important for us to communicate
internally and externally all the time.
In every organization, IT people need to talk to the
management and the board about these safety issues. I think that should be
brought to the table before these problems come up.
We have good systems, HPE end-to-end. Of course, one
thing that is important is to have modern technology in place, so we could have
a quick recovery, and that was a good thing.
Most important for us was that the IT management had the
trust from us -- the management and the board -- to invest in what they thought
was the best solution. We still saw some operational breaches and we need to do
better. This is a big focus with us. Every organization should invest time to
look into the infrastructure to see what to do to make it safer for quick
recovery, which is important for any company. Bring it on to the table for the
board, for the management, for a really good discussion -- it’s worth that.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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