The new SLA guarantee is the first SLA that customers will have to purchase rather than get free as part of Evergreen, but it provides significant benefits on getting the customer new clean hardware for recovery, assisted by a Pure engineer onsite.
Taruna Gandhi, VP, Product Marketing, Digital Experience, Pure Storage.
LAS VEGAS –Today at Pure//Accelerate 2023, Pure Storage is making a number of major announcements on the hardware front around new systems, which are particularly geared to making Pure a strong player up and down the data centre, from the high end mission-critical environments where they have always played, down to HDD replacement systems for more modest use cases. On the data protection side, no equivalent product announcements were made. But Pure did introduce several capabilities which strengthen their resiliency significantly. This includes leveraging AIOps for anomaly detection, data protection assessments, and self-service SafeMode configuration and administration, as well as a new ransomware recovery service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing a clean storage environment following an attack.
“Ransomware is on the upswing,” said Taruna Gandhi, VP, Product Marketing, Digital Experience at Pure Storage. “Many vendors protect against it with what are really just software solutions that bolt on. We start with the hardware layer. We earlier introduced SafeMode, which is our way of doing immutable backup. In March we enhanced it so that it was always on by default. Still, the issue remained of how you make sure you comply with best practices and are compliant, because just turning it on doesn’t set up the right policies. Now what we are announcing is new assessment and anomaly detection capabilities that strengthen data resiliency, as well as a new SLA focused on ransomware protection, detection and response in Evergreen//One for a clean storage environment.”
Through this new Ransomware Recovery SLA is the first SLA that Pure will sell as an add-on subscription rather than as a free core part of Evergreen//One Both existing and new Pure Storage Evergreen//One customers can now purchase an add-on service guarantee for a clean storage environment with bundled technical and professional services to quickly recover from an attack at scale.
“The new Ransomware Recovery SLA will ship clean arrays, and establish a recovery plan, with the vendor, us, getting it all up and running,” Gandhi said. “That’s something that is very important to customers. We also guarantee 24 hour shipment of clean arrays in North America.”
In addition to this next business day shipment, Evergreen//One will also guarantee 48-hours to finalize a recovery plan started at any time, a data transfer rate of 8 TiB/Hour, and a professional services engineer onsite.
“This ability to provide them with a clean array is important,” said Matt Bradford, Director of Technical Marketing at Pure. “What’s the point of software and services if they have no hardware to work with.”
“We also can provide a data and time stamp on when the anomaly started, so that the customer knows exactly at what point they should recover, and not lose any data unnecessarily,” Gandhi stated.
Gandhi also emphasized this is a very positive step both for the many software backup vendors with which Pure partners as well as their channel partners.
“We work very synergistically with our ecosystems around ransomware,” she said. “We work with all the major backup vendors. They provide the software and we provide a hardware piece to recover to. A lot of them have backup and recovery services that they offer. Knowing the hardware piece is taken care of, and that they can focus on services is huge for them.
“Channel partners are very excited about this as well because they now have a solid foundation they can build their practice on top of,” Gandhi added.
The anomaly detection capabilities, which are also included in the Ransomware SLA offering, are part of the new capabilities for the storage management platform, which leverage AIOps, and which also include data protection assessments, and self-service SafeMode configuration and administration. The data protection assessment lets organizations benchmark their entire Pure Storage fleet against leading data protection best practices while gaining actionable insights to achieve comprehensive data protection. A new self-service SafeMode PIN Multi Factor Authentication also improves security, by cutting down support cycles, and giving the customer full control over SafeMode policies.
“What is new and important about these is the policy-based upgrades,” Bradford said. “To simplify things, we have a number of new service upgrades and policy upgrades coming in, to make sure that the customers are able to proactively use them. We have been making these upgrades since last year, but the ability to let them set policies proactive is new, and is the big news among the broad resiliency capabilities that have been added.”
