Tech ONTAP Blogs
Tech ONTAP Blogs
Organizations continue to face the challenge of ransomware and attacks can cost a business time, resources, and reputation. An organization typically has two options after it has encountered ransomware: pay the ransom or restore from backups. Protection against ransomware attacks has become one of the high-priority requirements among customers.
Cloud Backup has now introduced support for DataLock and Ransomware protection on Cloud Snapshots. With this feature, Cloud Backup provides a mechanism to lock the Cloud Snapshots replicated via SM-C and provides the ability to detect a ransomware attack and recover a consistent copy of the cloud snapshot. The solution uses both SM-C and ADC to achieve the above functionality. Currently, the feature is supported only for StorageGRID and AWS.
Cloud Backup has now added support for Azure, which means you can now search for a specific file from all backups stored on Azure Blob cloud storage and then perform a restore. It provides users with a quick and focused search for files across all the backups in the cloud and gives options to narrow searches using multiple search criteria. The implementation has been done based on SnapDiff v3 with the full file system representation. The Search and Restore” solution has been developed using native cloud technology, which is fast, lean, and cost-optimized.
Searches based on
You can start using the Search & Restore feature if you already have a Cloud Manager Connector deployed and Cloud Backup is enabled on the Working Environment. Make sure that your Working Environment (On-prem ONTAP or Cloud Volumes ONTAP) version is 9.8 and above.
For more information, visit the Cloud Manager documentation.
To get started with the Search & Restore feature, make sure that Cloud Backup is enabled.
5. Now you will see all the Working Environments and you can go ahead and enable Indexing on the Working Environment that you would like. Click “Enable Indexing” .
6. Once the Indexed Catalog is enabled, appropriate services and databases will be created at the backend to start the cataloging features. Enabling Indexed Cataloging will result in the following:
a) The service will enable SnapDiff v3 on the Storage VM in your Working Environment.
b) It also provisions Azure Synapse Analytics for storing and querying Catalog dataset. This provisions Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and DataLake storage account to store the parquet file for quick querying.
7. Once the services are provisioned, the Indexed Catalog service for the Working Environment will be shown as “Active”
Now let's go ahead and check out the new UI that has been introduced for the “Search and Restore” feature and understand its functionality.
1. The new “Restore Dashboard” UI, will provide the option to “Browse & Restore” and “Search & Restore”. Click on “Search & Restore”.
2. To search for a file or a list of files having a common name, input the name of the file in the search bar and choose from where you would like to restore. You can search from “All Resources”, “Files”, or “Volumes”. To filter further, choose the “Filter by” options to filter by file types, file-creation dates, specific working environments, file sizes, and backup location.
3. Clicking on “View All Backups” will show all the backups both on the Cloud and Primary (local) which contains the particular file. Note that you will only be able to restore the selected file from the cloud backups. The “Restore” button on the Primary (local) backup copies will be grayed out as it's not supported as yet.
4. To restore a file, select the Restore location. You can Restore to the Original Location or Restore to an Alternate location.
5. Click Restore to complete the file restore process.
Cloud Backup has now added support for custom SnapMirror labels. Previously, Cloud Backup supported only pre-defined SnapMirror labels like hourly, daily, weekly, hourly and yearly. But now Cloud Backup can discover custom SnapMirror policies that have custom SnapMirror labels and expose them on Cloud Backup UI so that users can backup the Volume Snapshots with the SnapMirror label of their choice to the cloud object store.
Let's examine this feature a little in-depth:
Imagine a user has Volumes set with a snapshot policy that uses a custom SnapMirror label “12-hourly” and the user needs to replicate these snapshots created with this label to the cloud object store using Cloud Backup. To achieve this, the user would need to create a custom SnapMirror policy on ONTAP with the SnapMirror label. For example, let’s create a SnapMirror label with the snapshot label “12-hourly” using System Manager or ONTAP CLI.
Sfrtmeaws0108::> snapmirror policy create -vserver Sfrtmeaws0108 -policy 12-hourly -tries 8 -transfer-priority normal
Sfrtmeaws0108::> snapmirror policy add-rule -vserver Sfrtmeaws0108 -policy 12-hourly -snapmirror-label 12-hourly -keep 12
Sfrtmeaws0108::> snapmirror policy show
Vserver Policy Policy Number Transfer
Name Name Type Of Rules Tries Priority Comment
------- ------------------ ------ -------- ----- -------- ----------
Sfrtmeaws0108
12-hourly vault 1 8 normal -
SnapMirror Label: 12-hourly Keep: 12
Total Keep: 12
Now to backup the Working Environment with Volumes which has snapshots created with this specific label, Click the “enable” button in the Backup and Restore tab available on the right-hand “Services” panel.
This opens the Backup Activation wizard.
This can be also done for volumes that have already been backed up. You can modify the applicable snapmirror label of an existing backed-up volume by modifying the policy on the “Manage Volume” page. Make sure that you create the snapmirror policy on ONTAP using System Manager or ONTAP CLI.
Now its possible to enable Cloud Backup in working environments by dragging and dropping Cloud Volumes ONTAP /On-prem ONTP cluster on to Azue Blob Storage or Google Storage Bucket on the Canvas page in Cloud Manager UI.
When the user selects the Cloud Volumes ONTAP /On-prem ONTAP cluster and drags it onto an Azue Blob Storage or Google Storage Bucket, the user will be presented with a dialog box “Select a service to enable it”. Choosing the “Backup and Restore ” will trigger the Cloud Backup Wizard and proceed with the “Provider Setting” page. The user can give in the details for the “Provider Setting”, “Define Policy ” and “select Volumes” pages in the wizard and click on “Activate Backup ” to complete enabling Cloud Backup service on the working environment. You will , now be able to see that Cloud Backup for the source will be configured successfully according to policy and the relationship line will be drawn between the source and cloud storage (“Backup & Restore” with a representation of the direction).