IBM Storage Defender is a new software suite designed for Cyber Resiliency that protects your business. This offering is a need of the hour, especially in today's world with an extremely high risk of cyber attacks, breaches and demands for ransomware.
'Data Security' helps detect and prevent attacks and 'Data Protection' helps with recovery in case an attack happens. IBM Storage Defender incorporates both these elements to provide Data Resiliency and much more.
IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service (DMS) is a SaaS based management platform that provides multi-cluster management of your IBM Storage Defender Data Protect clusters, along with your IBM Storage Protect (formerly called Spectrum Protect or Tivoli Storage Manager) servers. By registering or claiming these servers to Data Management, you can easily view the overall health of your environment and manage your backup operations.
Recently, many new capabilities were delivered via its 1.4 release. Some of the important ones are listed below:
IBM Storage Defender Data Protect now includes the ability to protect IBM FlashSystem volume data
The first set of features introduced for same are as follows:
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- Registration or connecting IBM FlashSystem to the IBM Storage Defender Data Protect cluster.
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- Creating new policies or using existing policies for backup.
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- Creating Protection Groups to include volumes and volume groups.
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- Backup the full copies of volumes from the FlashSystem onto Data Protect.
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- Safeguarded Copy Snapshots can also be triggered as part of an additional setting. Safeguarded Copy function supports the ability to create cyber-resilient point-in-time copies of volumes that cannot be changed or deleted through user errors, malicious actions, or ransomware attacks. Isolating these backup copies from production data will help recover data quickly in case of a cyberattack.
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- Restore or recovery, to a target location. This location can also be a new one, which helps in case of a disaster or attack.
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- Snapshot copies can be replicated to another Data Protect cluster for an additional layer of protection.
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- Retention Periods can be set.
To back up IBM Storage FlashSystem volumes and volume groups, the Data Protect clusters must be running version 7.1.0 or a later version.
As Defender moves forward on its journey, many more functionalities for FlashSystem integration and simplification are on the way!
Please refer to below link for additional details:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-defender/base?topic=protect-backing-up-storage-flashsystem-volumes
IBM Storage Protect Related Additional Features
The IBM Storage Defender Data Protect cluster can now send data to an existing IBM Storage Protect server via it’s S3 interface, and then trigger the Storage Protect server to move that data to tape.
Detailed information about your IBM Storage Protect server can now be seen from the Cluster management view in DMS. This includes the Server version and capacity information.
IBM Storage Protect Health Alerts can be viewed from DMS. Some details related to this are listed below:
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- The 'Health' view as part of Cluster Management, gives a consolidated list of alerts from all your clusters. Thus making the life of the administrator easy.
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- IBM Storage Protect server has multiple categories of alerts, which are now mapped to DMS alert types and categories.
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- Hovering over an alert, shows its associated message. This makes it quick to check.
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- Details of the alert can also be seen. This includes timelines, category, status, cause, system action and user response.
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- Once the alert is resolved on IBM Storage Protect, it gets reflected on DMS alongwith the resolution summary.
Multi-factor authentication for the SaaS control plane
This improves the security of the solution by requiring the end user to submit to an additional level of verification before accessing the control plane.
For more details on Defender and features coming in future releases, please follow: IBM Storage Defender - IBM Documentation