Datadobi recently announced DobiProtect. I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Jack and Carl D’Halluin about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

The Problem

Disaster Recovery

Modern disaster recovery solutions tend more towards business continuity than DR. The challenge with data replication solutions is that it’s a trivial thing to replicate corruption from your primary storage to your DR storage. Backup systems are vulnerable too, and most instances you need to make some extra effort to ensure you’ve got a replicated catalogue, and that your backup data is not isolated. Invariably, you’ll be looking to restore to like hardware in order to reduce the recovery time. Tape is still a pain to deal with, and invariably you’re also at the mercy of people and processes going wrong.

What Do Customers Need?

To get what you need out of a robust DR system, there are a few criteria that need to be met, including:

• An easy way to select business-critical data;
• A simple way to make a golden copy in native format;
• A bunker site in a DC or cloud;
• A manual air-gap procedure;
• A way to restore to anything; and
• A way to failover if required.

Enter DobiProtect

What Does It Do?

The idea is that you have two sites with a manual air-gap between them, usually controlled by a firewall of some type. The first site is where you run your production workload, and there’ll likely be a subset of data that is really quirte important to your business. You can use DobiProtect to get that data from your production site to DR (it might even be in a bunker!). In order to get the data from Production to DR, DobiProtect scans the data before it’s pulled across to DR. Note that the data is pulled, not pushed. This is important as it means that there’s no obvious trace of the bunker’s existence in production.

[image courtesy of Datadobi]

If things go bang, you can recover to any NAS or Object.

• Browse golden copy
• Select by directory structure, folder, or object patterns
• Mounts and shares
• Specific versions

Bonus Use Case

One of the more popular use cases that Datadobi spoke to me about was heterogeneous edge-to-core protection. Data on the edge is usually more vulnerable, and not every organisation has the funding to put robust protection mechanisms in place at every edge site to protect critical data. With the advent of COVID-19, many organisations have been pushing more data to the edge in order for remote workers to have better access to data. The challenge then becomes keeping that data protected in a reliable fashion. DobiProtect can be used to pull data from the core once data has been pulled back from the edge. Because it’s a software only product, your edge storage can be anything that supports object, SMB, or NFS, and the core could be anything else. This provides a lot of flexibility in terms of the expense traditionally associated with DR at edge sites.

[image courtesy of Datadobi]

Thoughts and Further Reading

The idea of an air-gapped site in a bunker somewhere is the sort of thing you might associate with a James Bond story. In Australia these aren’t exactly a common thing (bunkers, not James Bond stories), but Europe and the US is riddled with them. As Jack pointed out in our call, “[t]he first rule of bunker club – you don’t talk about the bunker”. Datadobi couldn’t give me a list of customers using this type of solution because all of the customers didn’t want people to know that they were doing things this way. It seems a bit like security via obscurity, but there’s no point painting a big target on your back or giving clues out for would-be crackers to get into your environment and wreak havoc.

The idea that your RPO is a day, rather than minutes, is also confronting for some folks. But the idea of this solution is that you’ll use it for your absolutely mission critical can’t live without it data, not necessarily your virtual machines that you may be able to recover normally if you’re attacked or the magic black smoke escapes from one of your hosts. If you’ve gone to the trouble of looking into acquiring some rack space in a bunker, limited the people in the know to a handful, and can be bothered messing about with a manual air-gap process, the data you’re looking to protect is clearly pretty important.

Datadobi has a rich heritage in data migration for both file and object storage systems. It makes sense that eventually customer demand would drive them down this route to deliver a migration tool that ostensibly runs all the time as sort of data protection tool. This isn’t designed to protect everything in your environment, but for the stuff that will ruin your business if it goes away, it’s very likely worth the effort and expense. There are some folks out there actively looking for ways to put you over a barrel, so it’s important to think about what it’s worth to your organisation to avoid that if possible.