Asigra’s latest attempt to combat sophisticated malware that dumps ransomware on backup systems has taken the form of new hardware released in partnership with iXsystems.
The Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance – unveiled this week at VMworld 2018 – combines the cloud backup software vendor’s latest Cloud Backup Evolved solution with iXsystem’s TrueNAS storage hardware. The two companies’ customers, many of which they share, have been requesting this partnership and an ensuing product that combined the two vendors’ expertise, Brett Davis, executive vice-president of iXsystems told CDN.
“We’ve had customers using both TrueNAS and Asigra in concert for many years, so it was really their request saying ‘hey it would be great if you could merge these two technologies together so we don’t have to buy them separately.’ For us, it has extended the simplicity for deploying backup solutions for customers,” said Davis. “What we’ve also done is a create a solution that integrates Asigra into the UI as a service.”
The free, community-supported version of TrueNAS, called FreeNAS, is highly popular in open source circles, and according to a spokesperson for iXsystems, Canada ranks 10th in the world for most downloads per country. But it was the enterprise-grade version of FreeNAS that caught the attention of Asigra, said Eran Farajun, executive vice-president of Asigra. The Toronto-based company was planning to develop its second integrated appliance, but it quickly became clear the iXsystems had all of the new functions they were looking for, such as improved scalability and instant snapshot and replication capabilities.
“It was a natural fit,” he said. “This is the next generation appliance.”
Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance provide capacities from 504TB to 10.4PB and includes a future-proof 128-bit scale up file system designed for continuous use. Asigra’s latest backup software, which offers protection against ransomware that lays dormant in backup systems, comes included in the new product.
“In the last 24 months, ransomware has started to attack backup software products,” explained Farajun, indicating that cyber criminals have found a way around people’s attempts to protect themselves from traditional ransomware infections. Simply put, a virus lands on a network, sits dormant for three to six months, then when a company backs up its systems, it unknowingly dumps the virus into its backup repository. That’s when the virus detonates. Asigra can detect infections in the backup streams and in the old backups. It can then eliminate those infections before they detonate and launch more attacks in the future.
The Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance is available now through Asigra partners.
