ST May-Jun 2022

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

May/June 2022 

Vol 22, Issue 3 

NOT IF, BUT WHEN: 

Time to review your BCDR strategy 

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE: 

Data hubs, lakes & warehouses explained 

ROUNDTABLE: 

Backup - better safe than sorry? 

MARKET FOCUS: 

Streaming services 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

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The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

NOT IF, BUT WHEN: 

Time to review your BCDR strategy 


Vol 22, Issue 3 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


CONTENTS 

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE: 

Data hubs, lakes & warehouses explained 

ROUNDTABLE: 

Backup - better safe than sorry? 

MARKET FOCUS: 

Streaming services 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS 

COMMENT….....................................................................4 

How resilient is your data? 

MANAGEMENT: DISASTER RECOVERY…...….........…..6 

Backup your data - and help keep your business safe, says Joe Noonan, Product 

Executive, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Unitrends and Spanning 

06 

INTERVIEW: VERITAS………….....................................……8 

Storage magazine editor David Tyler catches up with Simon Jelley, General Manager 

for SaaS Protection, Endpoint and Backup Exec at Veritas Technologies 

TECHNOLOGY: DATA CENTRE COOLING..............…..10 

Vijay Madlani, co-CEO at Katrick Technologies, examines the costs of data centre 

cooling and how new approaches can revolutionise efficiency 

10 

EVENT: STORAGE AWARDS 2022.......................…….12 

The Storage Awards is in its 19th year - considerably older than many of the 

companies competing for the trophies! The full list of finalists is here, along with 

details of how to cast your vote 

MARKET FOCUS: STREAMING SERVICES.................18 

David Friend, co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies, discusses how cloud 

storage is powering the continued growth in streaming services 

CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TRED.........20 

Tampere Vocational College Tredu in Finland has implemented a hybrid solution that 

offers a unified portal for storage and backup of multiple services, eliminating the 

need to jump from one application to another 

18 

REVIEW: VERITAS BACKUP EXEC 22..................……22 

CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG.…...24 

University of Wollongong's Molecular Horizons Institute leads the way with cryogenic 

electron microscopy - supported by a scalable and affordable storage platform 

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP………..................................….26 

Is the data storage industry banging its head against a brick wall in its attempts to 

promote backup and data protection with initiatives such as the recent World Backup 

Day? Storage magazine gathered the thoughts of a selection of experts from across 

the sector 

26 

MANAGEMENT: BUSINESS CONTINUITY……….....….30 

A Business Continuity Plan is a thorough and complex plan to fight the ever-present 

and ever-costly risk of downtime - and moving operations to the cloud is the best 

shortcut to take, argues Amir Hashmi, CEO, and founder of zsah 

TECHNOLOGY: DNA STORAGE............................…….32 

Neil Ballinger, head of EMEA at automation parts supplier EU Automation, discusses 

the benefits of DNA storage as a solution to data archival 

MANAGEMENT: CYBER-RESILIENCE..................…….33 

Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat, introduces the 'four steps to holistic enterprise storage 

cyber-resilience' 

32 

STRATEGY: DATA INFRASTRUCTURE.......................34 

Simon Spring, Operations Director, EMEA at WhereScape, explains how organisations 

should choose between data hubs, lakes & warehouses 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards May/June 2022 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

SUB EDITOR: Mark Lyward 

mark.lyward@btc.co.uk 

HOW RESILIENT IS YOUR DATA? 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

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Barrow & Thompkins Connexions Ltd 

The May/June issue of Storage magazine includes, as ever, a satisfying selection 

of opinion and thought leadership articles, real life case studies, reviews and 

interviews. One piece that I think will resonate with many readers is our roundtable 

discussion on backup: cyber crime stories are everywhere these days, and 

increasingly we see backup touted as a possible solution - in part, at least - to this 

growing issue. 

While we used to see backup as a kind of insurance policy against unlikely 'disasters' 

- flood, fire, power cuts, etc., these days most of the talk around backup is how it 

could protect an organisation from ransomware and other deliberate criminal acts. 

Brian Spanswick of Cohesity argues that too narrow a focus on backup alone will not 

suffice: "Backup is a critical first step to data protection, but organisations must think 

strategically and strive for holistic cyber resilience, realising that backup is just one 

component of a much larger equation." 

The word resilience is one that crops up numerous times in the article, and certainly we 

are seeing a shift in attitude which seems to reflect a growing recognition that backup - 

or indeed data resilience - is something that needs to be baked in to our information 

management strategies, not a reactive process that only matters after the event. 

Chris Addis of Nasuni has an even more contentious perspective: "The vast majority 

of IT professionals we talk to want to get rid of backup and its associated headaches 

and challenges. Even in the age of cloud, cybersecurity threats associated with data 

such as ransomware are becoming more severe and frequent (one happening every 11 

seconds), forcing businesses to think differently about their data infrastructure and give 

more consideration to disaster recovery plans." 

Perhaps we are on the verge of a sea-change in how organisations consider their 

data - where the very idea of backups is seen as 'the old way of doing things'. As more 

and more data resides in multiple cloud environments, managed autonomously by AI 

and machine learning, we might see backup relegated to simply a background activity 

that needn't bother us: just a task that gets done by the system, securely and reliably. I 

suspect though that we are still some way away from that. 

Articles published reflect the opinions 

of the authors and are not necessarily those 

of the publisher or of BTC employees. While 

every reasonable effort is made to ensure 

that the contents of articles, editorial and 

advertising are accurate no responsibility 

can be accepted by the publisher or BTC for 

errors, misrepresentations or any 

resulting effects 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 


@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

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MANAGEMENT: DISASTER RECOVERY 

'NOT IF, BUT WHEN': 

TIME TO REVIEW YOUR BCDR STRATEGY 

BACKUP YOUR DATA - AND HELP KEEP YOUR BUSINESS SAFE, SAYS JOE NOONAN, PRODUCT 

EXECUTIVE, BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY, UNITRENDS AND SPANNING 

Backup and disaster recovery solutions 

have always been critical components for 

any business. The past two years have, 

however, raised the stakes. The pandemic has 

highlighted the scale of the data threats facing 

every business today. Cybercrime is rampant, 

with ransomware, account takeover attacks, 

and phishing schemes all proliferating. 

Moreover, while hardware failures do not 

make the news, they are a frequent occurrence 

that can cause significant data loss across an 

organisation along with deletions through user 

error or malicious intent. 

The shift to remote working over the past two 

years has also raised levels of business 

vulnerability. Work from home (WFH) and 

hybrid arrangements have created more 

challenges for IT professionals, especially with 

the rise in shadow IT, which is the use of 

software and devices without the explicit 

approval of the IT department. More 

employees working remotely means more 

opportunities for cybercriminals to breach 

weaker defences across a distributed network of 

personal devices, corporate laptops, unsecured 

Wi-Fi networks, and exponentially more remote 

connections to their servers and applications. 

CYBER-CRIME WAVE 

Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the 

remote and hybrid work world to conduct 

increasingly sophisticated attacks, making it 

even more critical for businesses to assess their 

business continuity and disaster recovery 

(BCDR) plans frequently. In fact, the UK 

Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) 

recently announced that it recorded a 2,650% 

surge in phishing and a 423% increase in 

malware incidents in 2021. Employees 

working from home are often an especially 

vulnerable target. 

As the cybercrime landscape evolves, 

organisations must shift to a "not if, but when" 

mindset when assessing their security needs, 

which includes their BCDR strategy. 

THE ROLE OF DATA BACKUP 

Today, with growing cyber-threats along with 

data living in more places than ever before, 

we are increasingly seeing the importance of 

having stringent data backup technologies 

and processes. 

It is especially key when you consider there is 

often zero tolerance for downtime in an alwayson 

world. Businesses are - often unrealistically - 

expected to be back up and running as normal 

immediately after a system failure. 

A robust backup approach is crucial if 

organisations want to avoid losing critical data. 

Many businesses find that difficult. Backup is 

often manual and unreliable, with 

administrators often wasting many hours every 

week babysitting the process and considerable 

time fixing errors. 

Additionally, tests to ensure that disaster 

recovery, or even just local recoveries, will work 

well have become more important as the 

06 STORAGE May/June 2022 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: DISASTER RECOVERY 

"Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the remote and hybrid work world to 

conduct increasingly sophisticated attacks, making it even more critical for 

businesses to assess their business continuity and disaster recovery plans 

frequently. In fact, the UK Information Commissioner's Office recently 

announced that it recorded a 2,650% surge in phishing and a 423% increase 

in malware incidents in 2021. Employees working from home are often an 

especially vulnerable target. As the cybercrime landscape evolves, 

organisations must shift to a 'not if, but when' mindset when assessing their 

security needs, which includes their BCDR strategy." 

amount of data continues to grow. But since 

these tests are often time-consuming, they 

typically are not completed as frequently as 

they need to be, are completed in 

inadequate ways, or sometimes not at all. 

PLANNING FOR RECOVERY 

Organisations that prioritise unified BCDR 

solutions will be best positioned to stop data 

loss incidents, whether through malicious 

cyberattacks, natural disasters, outages, 

power or hardware failures or accidental 

data deletion. BCDR represents a set of 

approaches or processes that help an 

organisation recover from a disaster and 

resume its routine business operations. 

Disaster recovery is a key element of an 

organisation's recovery strategy and involves 

getting IT systems up and running quickly 

following a disaster. Businesses need to 

determine acceptable downtime for critical 

systems and implement backup and disaster 

recovery solutions for them, as well as SaaS 

application data. 

Planning for disaster recovery involves first 

defining parameters for the company such 

as recovery time objective (RTO) - the 

maximum time systems can be down without 

causing significant damage to the business, 

and recovery point objective (RPO) - the 

amount of data that can be lost without 

affecting the business. 

Critically too, it also includes 

implementing backup and disaster 

recovery BCDR solutions and creating 

processes for restoring applications and 

data on all systems. 

TEST AND AUTOMATE 

To simplify the disaster recovery process, 

unified BCDR solutions use automated 

disaster recovery testing to ensure backups 

are ready when disaster strikes. 

Indeed, this kind of testing is a vital part of 

a backup and recovery plan. Without proper 

testing, organisations will never know if their 

backup can be recovered. According to the 

2019 State of IT Operations Survey Report, 

only 31 percent of the respondents test their 

disaster recovery plan regularly, which shows 

that businesses usually underestimate the 

importance of testing. Automation also plays 

a key role in day-to-day backup operations 

with unified BCDR solutions, with features 

that proactively fix common problems in the 

backup environment. 

Technicians can spend up to 33% of their 

day monitoring, managing, and 

troubleshooting backups. Organisations 

should therefore look for solutions that 

provide a unified view from a single 

dashboard to help save time and reduce 

human error. To achieve this, the best BCDR 

solutions integrate seamlessly with existing 

IT solutions. 

Every second counts in mitigating cyberattacks, 

so organisations should look for 

unified BCDR technologies that use AI and 

machine learning to identify suspicious 

activity and alert administrators. 

Getting the BCDR strategy right is critically 

important to the ongoing viability of any 

business. When implemented properly, it 

will ensure that organisations are able to 

operate as normally possible after an 

unexpected interruption, with minimal loss 

of data. 

Ultimately it will allow IT decision-makers 

to stop losing sleep over missed backups 

and failed recoveries and move positively 

ahead with a unified BCDR solution that 

offers the peace of mind they need. 

More info: www.unitrends.com 


@STMagAndAwards May/June 2022 


MAGAZINE 

07

INTERVIEW: VERITAS VERITAS 

A PROTECTIVE ENVIRONMENT 

STORAGE MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVID TYLER CATCHES UP WITH 

SIMON JELLEY, GENERAL MANAGER FOR SAAS PROTECTION, 

ENDPOINT AND BACKUP EXEC AT VERITAS TECHNOLOGIES 

David Tyler: The pandemic obviously has 

driven some huge changes in how 

business itself works - but is it one of 

the main drivers for Veritas as a business and 

for your customers in terms of challenges? 

Simon Jelley: From a customer challenge 

perspective, COVID-19 has accelerated the 

move to remote working. But even before 

COVID we knew we were on the path to much 

more cloud adoption and different 

infrastructure and application approaches. 

Customers are moving towards embracing 

whatever their definition of a Cloud platform is. 

The business application owners are essentially 

the ones driving adoption of those cloud 

technologies - and for good business driven 

reasons. Organisations have had to make big 

shifts towards servicing customers and 

employees sitting in home offices. 

At the same time we've seen the rise of 

ransomware threats and vulnerability overall 

- what we've termed the 'vulnerability lag'. 

We did research which revealed that some 

80% of organisations say they've 

implemented new cloud capabilities or 

expanded elements of their cloud beyond 

what they originally planned as a response to 

COVID-19. So they've accelerated that, but 

have they looked at what that means from a 

regulatory or data protection perspective? 

What data is now being shared out there, 

what are the privacy and legal requirements 

- and do they have backups of that data? 

That's the vulnerability lag. 

DT: So what is Veritas offering to help with 

these issues? 

SJ: A lot of customers have deployed SaaS 

applications under the assumption that that just 

takes care of the problem for them. The reality 

is if you dig into the contract you've signed with 

Microsoft, AWS, Workday or Salesforce, they 

protect and provide reliability for the 

infrastructure they're running, but you're still 

responsible for your data. They don't give any 

guarantees around the recoverability of the 

data itself. 

We're working hard to be part of the 

education aspect of that, helping customers be 

more aware of what are they buying into with 

the cloud. And then we also provide the 

infrastructure capabilities through software and 

the move to SaaS, whether it be for the 

protection of SaaS applications directly or for 

being able to manage directly from the cloud 

using the Kubernetes driven platform, we're 

trying to offer a 'single pane of glass' solution. 

DT: Is there an argument to be made that 

some of the large as-a-service vendors might 

not be as open as they ought to be about 

where their responsibilities end and the users' 

responsibilities start, when it comes to data 

protection? 

SJ: Perhaps it doesn't help these cloud firms in 

the selling cycle to say, 'Oh, by the way, have 

you considered you're going to still need to 

make sure you have the right security 

infrastructure in place? Should you be backing 

up this data? Are you dealing with sensitive 

information you typically want protected?' 

In fairness though, these firms are starting to 

publish a shared responsibility model which 

makes it very clear that the infrastructure at the 

top of the stack is covered, with reliability 

goals, failover etc. - but as you go down the 

stack? Data? No, that's still your responsibility. 

If you need version control, or recoverability 

back X years, compliance requirements to 

retain data for so many years - that's all on 

you, Mr. Customer. 

DT: Is that perhaps partly because the 

business itself is getting more involved in 

those purchasing decisions, as opposed to IT 

- and those people are primarily focused on 

the business need, not about backup and 

data protection? 

SJ: I think that's spot on. It ties in with the 

consumerisation of IT, right? I like this 

application, I use a version of it at home and I 

want to see if there's a business version 

available. Increasingly end user teams choose 




MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW: INTERVIEW: VERITAS 

the platform, they find the budget, and then 

they turn to IT saying 'We've bought this, can 

you integrate it for us?' - and only then does 

the IT team get to ask about security standards, 

privacy, and so on. 

The reality is that it's always a good thing for 

us when there's change happening with 

customers. Our business is about helping 

customers move forward; optimise their 

business, their application infrastructure - we 

need to keep offering the protection, the 

security, the availability that we've been known 

for, for 20 plus years. 

Nowadays we're much more involved with the 

customers' business: we act as a key advisor 

and partner, and it helps us get much closer to 

that real business purpose. And the other main 

challenge that's happened around this whole 

acceleration to cloud is in really understanding 

what data you have, where it's going to be 

located, what's the most important to protect 

with the highest level of availability? This has 

always been a challenge, always a critical 

problem to solve. But it's becoming an even 

bigger problem now as users go to not just 

multiple on-prem infrastructure, but multi-cloud 

infrastructure as well. 

DT: Let's talk about some of the specific 

developments in Veritas products that are 

addressing the issues you've been talking 

about. 

SJ: One key aspect is in providing a basic level 

of capability with solutions like Backup Exec for 

integrating these cloud workloads. Our big 

push with version 22 (reviewed elsewhere in 

this issue of Storage magazine) is integration of 

Microsoft 365 support, in particular, into what 

we already provide with Backup Exec, which is 

a very simple, secure and unified platform for 

the SMB customer. We're able to say 'Look, the 

platform you've already invested in will move 

and shift with you as you go through that shift 

to cloud.' 

We've also made a big investment around 

ransomware protection and resiliency, by 

automated discovery of threats. Our vision is 

moving towards even more automated data 

protection, autonomous data management, as 

we call it. Often the IT team in particular 

doesn't quite understand how the business is 

using the data. We want to work with the 

application layers, and make sure that we 

protect those with a data protection profile 

that's consistent with the right data protection 

policy overall. We're already doing this, for 

example, with the Microsoft 365 capability. We 

can do things like policies where if you just add 

a new user into an AD group, we automatically 

protect that, whereas previously a backup 

admin would need to come in and create a 

new user and create and connect the policy - a 

very manual process. 

In the future protection will simply have to be 

more autonomous, because it's impossible 

ultimately for one admin in a company to keep 

up with the level of data growth and spread. 

Again, this is made worse if the application 

owners are driving the evolution without IT's 

involvement. There's noone 'watching the 

henhouse' as it were, in terms of making sure 

that policies stay aligned. 

DT: How will this autonomous data protection 

work, and how close are we to it now? 

SJ: It's an evolving capability, but the reality is 

we already have AI and machine learning in 

our offerings to try and detect patterns, for 

instance. When it comes to ransomware, we 

take the attitude that it is going to happen to 

you: not 'if', but 'when'. It's a game wherein the 

attackers move forwards and the defence still 

plays catch-up, unfortunately. 

The fact that we're seeing so many successful 

ransomware attacks indicates that while 

preventing them is a noble effort, keeping the 

attackers away from compromising your 

backup data once they're in is more important 

than ever. If it does enter the data stream, we 

can detect the patterns that suggest that the 

data is not something you want to recover and 

push back into mainstream use. 

Increasingly ransomware attackers 

deliberately target backup vendors; they want 

to try to shut us down as a recovery option. So 

we're using AI/ML techniques to say 'Look, this 

latest backup compared to what we saw before 

as a data stream, there's something off in this, it 

doesn't look right.' It's about being able to 

move away from that world of the backup 

admin, or whoever is in charge of defining the 

policies, having to take action in order for 

protection to take place. 

DT: Ransomware is clearly a driver for your 

business in a way that it never used to be - has 

it changed how backup is bought and sold, 

and how Veritas markets its products? 

SJ: I think the reality is it's now being driven by 

policy, from C-level down in terms of taking 

cybercrime seriously and making sure you've 

got protection techniques in place. The one 

place you can recover from is your backups. 

Of course if we asked customers 'Do you have 

backup?', they would generally say yes. OK, 

but do you understand your backup policies - 

and do you regularly test them to ensure you 

can recover that particular site or that particular 

file? That's a whole different set of questions. 

What the growth in cyber-crime has done is 

allowed us to showcase the capabilities that 

were always there, the fact that we can do 

recovery rehearsal drills, that we can have 

multiple different policy types and automate 

how those policies get applied to different types 

of data. But a lot of customers frankly weren't 

leveraging that. They were just saying, 'Well, 

I've checked the box'. 

From our point of view, the uniqueness of 

our portfolio is that we've got very strong 

products within the availability and data 

protection piece that we're very well known for, 

of course. But those tie into products that look 

at digital compliance, and the auditing 

aspects. And we're bringing all this together 

into this autonomous data management 

approach. That's what we're building into the 

reality of our products, and Backup Exec right 

now is obviously the main driver for that in 

terms of how we're driving the SMB and midmarket 

segment. 

More info: www.veritas.com 




MAGAZINE 

09

TECHNOLOGY: 

TECHNOLOGY: DATA CENTRE COOLING 

SAVED BY THE BELL 

VIJAY MADLANI, CO-CEO AT KATRICK TECHNOLOGIES, EXAMINES THE COSTS OF DATA CENTRE 

COOLING AND HOW NEW APPROACHES CAN REVOLUTIONISE EFFICIENCY 

Data underpins every aspect of modern 

life, with more information generated 

now than ever before. Keeping data 

centres cool is crucial for their safe and 

effective function, but due to the large 

amounts of waste heat they generate, this 

requires significant power consumption. To 

tackle this issue, Glasgow-based green 

energy pioneer Katrick Technologies has 

developed and patented a unique passive 

cooling system that removes waste heat 

without external power required. 

We are generating more data than ever 

before, with 44 zettabytes of data in storage 

as of 2020 and this expected to increase to 

over 200 zettabytes by 2025. To put this into 

perspective, a single zettabyte is equivalent to 

one trillion gigabytes. Much of this data is 

stored in data centres; dedicated facilities 

containing servers to store large amounts of 

data. Data centres are an integral part of the 

global economy, storing everything from our 

personal information to business and 

infrastructure data. 

With the nature of data stored in these 

centres, and the extreme sensitivity of some 

content, they require their own infrastructure, 

security, networks, and backup power 

supplies to limit the damage of potential 

problems. Environmental conditions are also 

highly important and maintaining an 

appropriate temperature round the clock can 

prevent overheating and failure of critical 

equipment. 

In the UK there are approximately 400-450 

data centre facilities, and TechUK estimates 

they consume 6TWh annually to run, not 

including the 3-4TWh required for server 

rooms. This figure is set to rise exponentially 

as the number of data centres increases, with 

a 2018 Nature study estimating that they will 

be responsible for 8,000 TWh of 

consumption by 2030. 

Keeping data centres cool uses a significant 

amount of energy, with 90 per cent of the air 

conditioning and air handling units used by 

the UK data centre market consuming an 

estimated 26 to 41 per cent of the total 

energy. These figures highlight why it is so 

crucial to find more efficient solutions for 

data centres. This is the motivation behind the 

Katrick Technologies passive cooling system. 

Katrick's bespoke end-to-end solution 

removes excess heat without the need for any 

external power, keeping centres at a constant 

ideal temperature and offering a zero-carbon 

alternative to traditional cooling units. The 

passive cooling system uses a Thermal 

Vibration Bell (TVB) heat engine to maintain 

consistent cool temperatures in a data centre 

environment. The TVB uses bi-fluids which, 

when heated, produce fluid vibrations which 

are captured by fins and transferred to 

mechanical vibrations. The fins then oscillate, 

dissipating 

excess heat 

in the 

environment and providing cool 

temperatures. 

The novel technology has been trialled at 

iomart's data centre in Glasgow as of October 

2021, where a 120kW capacity TVB system 

was installed. Initial results from this trial 

indicate that implementing Katrick's TVB engine 

can reduce power consumption by the site's 

cooling system by up to 50 per cent and may 

even reduce a data centre's total energy 

consumption by 25 per cent overall. 

Katrick's technology offers a cost-effective 

solution that is straightforward to implement 

and maintain long term. The system is 

designed to be modular and scalable, tailored 

to the end-user based on their specific 

requirements and the size of their facility. 

Having systems in place to ensure that data 

centres can be an effective and reliable 

platform to store vast amounts of often 

personal and confidential data is now vital. 

This new system is a significant step forward for 

the industry and is an extremely promising 

development in a field that is only going 

to become more important. 

More info: 

www.katricktechnologies.com 




MAGAZINE

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EVENT: 

EVENT: STORAGE AWARDS 2022 

N-N-N-N-NINETEEN 

THE STORAGE AWARDS IS NOW IN ITS 19TH YEAR - 

CONSIDERABLY OLDER THAN MANY OF THE COMPANIES 

COMPETING FOR THE TROPHIES! THE FULL LIST OF FINALISTS IS 

BELOW, ALONG WITH DETAILS OF HOW TO CAST YOUR VOTE 

We say it every year, but that 

doesn't make it any less true - the 

Storage Awards ceremony is the 

leading event in the industry calendar: 

enjoyed by hundreds of the great and 

good from all across the IT sector, with 

attendees from all over the world. These 

awards recognise the industry's finest 

products, companies and individuals as 

voted by you, the users and partners of 

those organisations. 

Next year will see the 20th year of the 

awards, so let's make the final year of our 

teens into a special one by making it our 

biggest and best ever. The full list of 

finalists in every category is on the 

following pages, so please do take a 

moment to visit the Awards website (see 

below), and be sure to cast your votes 

before 30th May. All of the categories are 

open to public voting apart from the 

Editor's Choice awards, Recognition of 

Service to the Industry award, and the 

award for Storage Solution of the Year. 

Anyone wanting to get involved in 

sponsorship and other commercial 

opportunities around the Awards should 

contact lucy.gambazza@btc.co.uk or 

stuart.leigh@btc.co.uk soon, as sponsor 

slots are filling up fast! 

Below is the time-line for the remaining 

stages of the awards process. 

Storage Awards 2022 Calendar: 

7th April: Finalists announced & voting 

opens 

30th May: Voting closes 

9th June: Awards Ceremony, London 

More info: www.storage-awards.com 




MAGAZINE

EVENT: 


STORAGE AWARDS 2022 FINALISTS 

STORAGE INNOVATION OF THE YEAR 

Cloudian S3 Object Lock 

Denodo Data virtualization 

Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 Series 

HPE Alletra 9000 

Hornetsecurity 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup 

Infinidat InfiniBox SSA II 

Lenovo 

NVMe over TCP SAN-Only 

Open-E JovianDS 

Pure Storage Portworx Data Service 

Quantum Scalar i6 

Scality 

Artesca 

Seagate Exos X 5U84 

Seagate Lyve 

SoftIron 

HyperDrive Performance 

Stormagic ARQvault 

StorPool StorPool Storage 

Spectra Logic Vail 

Tintri 

T700 

Vast Data Universal Storage System 

Veritas 

Backup Exec 22 with M365 Support 

ONE TO WATCH - VENDOR 

Denodo 

Hammerspace 

Hornetsecurity 

Object Matrix 

Ortial 

SoftIron 

Stormagic 

Storone 

Storpool 

Tintri 

Virtuozzo 

Vast Data 

Wasabi 

ONE TO WATCH - CHANNEL 

iSYSTEMS 

Maple Networks 

101 Data Solutions 

Oriium Consulting 

Phoenix47 

Primesys Ltd 

Procurri 

Spinnakar 

IMMUTABLE STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Cloudian 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Nexsan 

Quantum 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Vast Data 

Wasabi 

STORAGE MARKETING TEAM OF THE YEAR 

CMS Distribution 

Datacore 

Denodo 


Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Q Associates 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Spinnakar 

Titan Data Solutions 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Vast Data 

CONTRIBUTION TO THE STORAGE INDUSTRY 

Cloudian - Jon Brooks 

CoolSpirit - Alex Raben 

DataCore - Craig Hatter 

Epaton - Jon Lassmann 

Infinidat - Phil Bullinger 

Nexsan - Mark Walker 

Nexstor - Troy Platts 

Procurri - Mat Jordan 

Q Associates - Andrew Rigby 

Seagate - Andy Palmer 

Spectra Logic - Iain Hamilton 

StorMagic - Simon Marrion 

Virtual Effect - Jane Symons 

Virtuozzo - Mick Bradley 

CHANNEL EXCELLENCE AWARD 

Arcserve - Tony Parry 

CMS Distribution - Gareth Reynolds 

Hornetsecurity - Colin Wright 

HPE - Lewis Simmonds 

Infinidat - Eric Herzog 

Lenovo - James Hope-Urwin 

Procurri - Chris Gregory 

Procurri - Simon Tickner 

Pure Storage - Nigel Denham 

SoftIron - Phil Crocker 

Spinnakar - Gerard Brophy 

StorMagic - Brian Grainger 

Titan Data Solutions - Harry Berner 

Veeam - Pam Napier 

RANSOMWARE PROTECTION COMPANY 

OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

ExaGrid 

Infinidat 

Nexsan 

Quantum 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Zerto (A HPE Company) 




MAGAZINE 

13

EVENT: 


CLOUD BACKUP COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 


HPE 

IBM 

Quantum 

Spectra Logic 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Wasabi 

DATA PROTECTION COMPANY 

OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

ExaGrid 


HPE 

IBM 

Quantum 

Rubrik 

Spectra Logic 

Vast Data 

Veeam 

Veritas 

DATA MANAGEMENT & MONITORING VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

DataCore 

Denodo 

Hitachi Vantara 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Komprise 

NetApp 

Park Place Technologies 

Pure Storage 

Spectra Logic 

Veeam 

Veritas 

OBJECT STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Cloudian 

DataCore 


HPE 

IBM 

NetApp 

Object Matrix 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Scality 

Spectra Logic 

Wasabi 

ENTERPRISE BACKUP HARDWARE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Boston 

Cloudian 

Dell Technologies 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Lenovo 

Nexsan 

Quantum 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Synology 

Vast Data 

STORAGE INNOVATORS OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

Denodo 

ExaGrid 


Nexsan 

Pure Storage 

Seagate 

SoftIron 

Spectra Logic 

Storpool 

Vast Data 

HYPER-CONVERGENCE VENDOR 

OF THE YEAR 

Boston 

DataCore 


HPE 

Nutanix 

Open-E 

StarWind 

StorMagic 

Storpool 

Supermicro 

Synology 

Virtuozzo 

HYBRID STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Boston 


ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

NetApp 

Nexsan 

Object Matrix 

Panasas 

Quantum 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Supermicro 

Synology 




MAGAZINE

EVENT: STORAGE EVENT: 

AWARDS 2022 

"AS A SERVICE" PLATFORM OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 


HPE 

Komprise 

NetApp 

Nexstor 

Pure Storage 

Storpool 

Veritas 

Wasabi 

Zadara 

FLASH/SSD STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Accelstor 

Denodo 

HPE 

IBM 

NetApp 

Nexsan 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Vast Data 

PERFORMANCE STORAGE VENDOR 

OF THE YEAR 

Accelstor 

Dell EMC 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

NetApp 

Ortial 

Panasas 

Pavilion Data Systems 

Pure Storage 

Seagate 

SoftIron 

Tintri 

Vast Data 

CLOUD ENABLER OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

Denodo 

IBM 

NetApp 

Spectra Logic 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Virtuozzo 

Wasabi 

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE (SDS) VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

DataCore 

Hammerspace 

IBM 

Object Matrix 

Open-E 

Pure Storage 

SoftIron 

StarWind 

StorMagic 

Storpool 

Veritas 

STORAGE PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATION COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Accelstor 

ExaGrid 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Komprise 

NetApp 

Ortial 

Pure Storage 

SoftIron 

Storpool 

Vast Data 

CAPACITY STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Boston 

Cloudian 

Dell EMC 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Nexsan 

Quantum 

Scality 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Supermicro 

Synology 

Vast Data 

CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

Infinidat 

Lenovo - Lenovo Data Champions 

Nexsan 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Seagate 

Veeam 

Veritas 

MULTI-VENDOR SERVICE PROVIDER 

OF THE YEAR 

CDS 

Centerprise 

Nexstor 


Procurri 

Q Associates 

Service Express 

StorTrec 

Ultra Support 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards May/June 2022 


MAGAZINE 

15

EVENT: 


STORAGE REPAIR CENTRE AND BROKER OF THE YEAR 

Agilitas 

Evernex 

Gentronics 


Procurri 

Sprague 

Top Ten 

Ultratec 

SECURITY STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR 

Maple Networks 

NGS 

Nexstor 

Telefonica Tech 

SPECIALIST STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR 

101 Data Solutions 

CoolSpirit 

Cristie Data 

Epaton 

iSystems 

Nexstor 

PrimeSys 

Q Associates 

Trustco 

Virtual Effect 

CORPORATE STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR 

CDW 

Computacenter 

Insight 

Q Associates 

SCC 

Softcat 

Stone Group 

Trustmarque 

XMA 

STORAGE DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR 

Arrow ECS 

CMS Distribution 

Ethos Technology 

Exertis 

Nuvias 

Spinnakar 

Tech Data 

Titan Data Solutions 

Westcoast 

CLOUD PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve - Cloud Direct 

Barracuda - Cloud to Cloud Backup 

Hornetsecurity - Altaro VM Backup 

HPE - Greenlake 

Object Matrix - Matrix Store Cloud 

Rubrik - Cloud Vault 

Seagate - Lyve 

Spectra Logic - Spectra Vail 

Veeam - Backup and Replication 

Virtuozzo - Hybrid Infrastructure 

Wasabi - Direct Connect 

STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve - X-Series Appliance 

Barracuda - Cloud to Cloud Backup 

Cloudian - HyperStore 

DataCore - SWARM 

ExaGrid - EX84 

HPE - GreenLake edge-to-cloud 

Infinidat - InfiniBox SSA II 

Komprise - Elastic Data Migration 

Pure Storage - FlashBlade 

Quantum - Scalar Ransom Block 

Seagate - EXOS 

SoftIron - HyperDrive 

StorMagic - ARQvault 

CLOUD COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Barracuda 

DataCore 


HPE 

IBM 

Object Matrix 

Veeam 

Virtuozzo 

Wasabi 

STORAGE COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

Dell EMC 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Komprise 

Lenovo 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Scality 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Tintri 

Vast Data 

Veeam 

In addition, winners in the following award categories will be chosen by 

Storage Magazine, and are not open to voting: 

Recognition of Service to the Industry 

Storage Solution of the year 

Editor's Choice - Company 

Editor's Choice - Product 

Editor's Choice - Vendor 

More info: www.storage-awards.com 




MAGAZINE

MARKET FOCUS: STREAMING FOCUS: 

SERVICES 

FULL STREAM AHEAD 

DAVID FRIEND, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF WASABI TECHNOLOGIES, DISCUSSES HOW CLOUD 

STORAGE IS POWERING THE CONTINUED GROWTH IN STREAMING SERVICES 

Demand for streaming services was 

turbo-charged by the pandemic. 

Streaming platforms saw subscriptions 

spiral with Ofcom reporting that 60% of 

households in the UK had access to a paid 

streaming service in 2020, compared to 49% 

in 2019. 

Efforts to capitalise on this surge have led to 

the well-documented 'streaming wars' between 

platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ as 

they compete for subscriptions and look to 

build their content portfolios. 

This all means platforms need to store more 

video data while also handling ever-growing 

audience demand to access that data. As a 

result, streaming platforms have found 

themselves coming up against the hurdles 

around ballooning data, storage requirements 

and ease of access for consumers. 

Accommodating a backlog of stored media 

files while also providing consistent uptime for 

consumers is a major challenge that 

platforms have to face. At the heart of this 

problem is the effective and affordable 

management of file sizes. 

FILE SIZE AND BACKUPS 

Alongside the increased demand for content 

and streaming services in the pandemic, the 

demand for content presented in high-quality 

4K and 5K definition has risen to the point of 

almost being an expectation. This is 

particularly the case where premium content 

is concerned. 

What this means is that streaming platforms 

must not only have huge files on hand for 

subscribers to access immediately and with 

minimal latency, but also that these huge files 

have to be stored and transported all over the 

world for editing, archiving and storage. 

Storing these large files is a challenge as the 

task requires almost endless storage capacity - 

media archives are not shrinking any time 

soon. On top on this, the files must also be 

easily accessible for those who need them. 

As media archives expand, many platforms 

are looking to monetise their archives. 

Platforms are seeking methods to allow 

consumers to easily and reliably access their 

archived files and data for on-demand 

streaming services. Bottomless secure 

storage is an expensive task for IT teams that 

are using on-premise capacity or updating 

legacy systems. 

It is for this reason that organisations working 

with media and entertainment files and 

archives of these sizes are increasingly turning 

to the cloud for flexible, and more economical, 

storage of their media archives. 

SWITCHING TO THE CLOUD 

Moving away from on-premise and into the 




MAGAZINE

MARKET FOCUS: STREAMING FOCUS: 

SERVICES 

"Switching to the cloud can be simple. It can be a cheaper 

and more secure option than on-premise proprietary legacy 

systems, especially when partnering with the right storage 

providers. The cloud also solves the scalability problem of 

an ever-expanding backlog of large files that need to be 

accessible on-demand to both those working with the files, 

and consumers. In the long-run, it's a near-certain bet that 

streaming services will be fully powered by cloud storage." 

cloud can be a game-changer when it comes 

to effectively scaling data management. 

Cloud storage is secure and 'bottomless'. 

Cloud storage is limited only by what an 

organisation can and is willing to pay for, while 

also allowing remote production teams to 

reliably transfer huge files around the world. 

This can offer easy access to data when 

released to consumers as on-demand content, 

while also offering a secure back-up solution 

for in-progress or embargoed content. 

So the obvious question becomes, why aren't 

all media and entertainment companies 

already using the cloud? 

For some, the problem is just the pace of 

change. Many are slow to adapt or reticent to 

unload legacy architectures and operating 

systems that have proved reliable and effective 

up until this point. This can also be a sticking 

point for IT leaders trying to sell a switch to 

other senior decision-makers. 

However, the most common concern with the 

cloud is the cost. Not only can doing away 

with old systems be expensive, the cloud itself 

comes with costs. Between storage expenses 

per gigabyte, egress fees and API call fees, you 

can rack up a fair amount of money owed to 

your cloud services provider. And, on top of 

this, many organisations have found 

themselves blind-sided by unpredictable fees. 

For instance, extraneous or unplanned egress 

fees are often easily hidden until the bill is 

offered up. Data egress is the process of data 

departing from a network to an external 

location and, therefore, are necessarily 

charged retroactively to organisations. By 

gigabyte, cloud storage tends to be cheaper 

than on-premise storage, but unplanned fees 

and additional costs like egress and API calling 

fees add up. 

More than this, many hyperscaler cloud 

providers have a complex selection of service 

tiers that can be confusing to break down, and 

organisations can make mistakes accounting 

for their needs - thereby incurring additional 

consequential cost. 

MANAGING FEES 

Managing cloud fees does not need to be 

a complex process. Though hyperscalers 

like AWS, Azure, and Google have come 

to increasingly dominate the market of 

cloud providers and it can be easy to find 

yourself locked-in to their 'one-stop-shop' 

ecosystem offerings, more specialised 

providers are increasingly rising to provide 

best-of-breed alternatives that avoid the 

unexpected fees or complex tiering systems 

of these larger providers. 

Not only can specialised providers often offer 

more straightforward solutions, but some also 

offer streamlined and simplified cloud storage 

whilst eschewing tiers and additional egress 

and API call costs. This means that media and 

entertainment companies and platforms can 

access their data without the fear of accruing 

thousands in unplanned fees. 

Switching to the cloud can be simple. It can 

be a cheaper and more secure option than 

on-premise proprietary legacy systems, 

especially when partnering with the right 

storage providers. The cloud also solves the 

scalability problem of an ever-expanding 

backlog of large files that need to be 

accessible on-demand to both those working 

with the files, and consumers. In the long-run, 

it's a near-certain bet that streaming services 

will be fully powered by cloud storage. 

More info: www.wasabi.com 




MAGAZINE 

19

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU 

ENSURING THE SAFETY OF DATA IN THE CLOUD 

TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU IN FINLAND HAS IMPLEMENTED A HYBRID SOLUTION THAT 

OFFERS A UNIFIED PORTAL FOR STORAGE AND BACKUP OF MULTIPLE SERVICES, ELIMINATING THE NEED 

TO JUMP FROM ONE APPLICATION TO ANOTHER 

With Microsoft 365's retention policy for 

deleted items of 30 days, Tampere's 

technical team needed to find a solution 

to house, and always be able to retrieve, 

this vital data. Meanwhile another factor 

that needed to be addressed was the 

operational expense for any solution 

being deployed. 

Tampere Vocational College Tredu is 

a college based in Tampere, the 

second largest city in Finland. The 

college offers vocational programmes in 

Finnish secondary education in various 

fields including Technology, Natural 

Sciences, Communications and Tourism. 

Tampere's student population increased 

significantly in 2013 when Pirkanmaa 

Educational Consortium and the existing 

Tampere College merged, and today 

Tampere hosts approximately 18,000 

students and 1,000 staff members across 

its curriculum and campus. 

A SERIES OF CHALLENGES 

As an educational institution, Tampere 

has a legal obligation to retain data 

generated by both students and staff. 

With an increasing reliance on services 

such as Microsoft 365, this means more 

data is being generated on the cloud 

than ever. Coupled with the challenges 

the global pandemic has brought, remote 

working and offsite learning means 

services such as these are leveraged even 

more keenly and have become a 

significant part of the educational 

landscape. 

Aside from the accounts of the 18,000 

students and 1,000 faculty members, 

Tampere college also need to protect 

data in accounts of former students and 

academic projects. This means they have 

to contend with over 34,000 Drive, 

Contact and Calendar accounts and in 

excess of 68,000 mailboxes and over 

11,000 SharePoints. Added to the 

pressure of this, the school has a massive 

domain system in which new accounts are 

created frequently and old accounts are 

closed, which in turn creates 

management complexities. 

Arttu Miettunen, Systems Analyst at 

Tampere, began his search and 

benchmarked various solutions from 

major backup providers. Eventually it was 

clear Synology could not only resolve the 

issues of data storage, but also offered 

backup for Microsoft services with no 

license costs. Having the storage 

hardware and backup as an integrated 

solution brings further reassurance to the 

team managing this task. 

MEETING ALL REQUIREMENTS 

An SA3600 unit was deployed with 12 x 

12TB Enterprise HDDs, along with the 

added benefit of 2 x SNV3500 400G, 

Synology's M.2 NVMe SSDs to create a 

cache. The current backup occupies 

15TBs of storage, however, as Tampere's 

data needed to grow, the team was 

acutely aware that the solution also had 

to offer scalability. This was an obstacle 

that the SA3600 can readily handle, with 

12 existing bays in the base unit and the 

facility to scale up to 180 drives with use 

of Synology expansion units. In addition, 

Active Backup for Microsoft 365 comes 

with de-duplication in place, which cuts 

down the backup by 7 terabytes in the 

first run, achieving 46% saving on 

storage media. 

Arttu and his team knew they wanted 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU 

"It could have been difficult to predict how performance might have been affected 

as the number of users and amount of data increased, but this was resolved by 

deploying an SSD cache with the Synology NVMe SSDs in place. This handled 

substantial caching workloads in this multi-user environment by making the data 

available on the lower latency NVMe SSDs instead of having to retrieve it from the 

slower hard disk drives. By deploying a shrewd hybrid storage system with HDDs 

and SSDs, Tampere enjoy maximum value from their disk array." 

it from the slower hard disk drives. By 

deploying a shrewd hybrid storage system 

with HDDs and SSDs, Tampere enjoy 

maximum value from their disk array. 

MANAGEABLE & FUTUREPROOF 

By utilising Synology's Active Backup for 

Microsoft 365, Tampere benefit from: 

Comprehensive protection and backup 

for Teams, SharePoint Online, 

OneDrive and Exchange Online 

Full integration with Azure AD 

Easy and centralised management 

portal with advanced permissions 

controls 

Cost saving with license-free software 

and data deduplication 

Future-proofing with scalable storage 

via expansion 

one unified portal for the storage and 

backup of multiple services to eliminate 

the need to jump from one application to 

another. When new students and faculty 

join onto the school's Azure AD, accounts 

must be detected and protected 

automatically. The IT team wanted to give 

restoration privileges to some users but 

not all, and had to be able to tweak the 

setting easily. After a trial with Synology, 

Arttu is confident that this solution covers 

all their requirements and will last them 

for many years. 

It could have been difficult to predict 

how performance might have been 

affected as the number of users and 

amount of data increased, but this was 

resolved by deploying an SSD cache with 

the Synology NVMe SSDs in place. This 

handled substantial caching workloads in 

this multi-user environment by making the 

data available on the lower latency 

NVMe SSDs instead of having to retrieve 

With Synology Active Backup for 

Microsoft 365 deployed, the Tampere 

team is now able to protect the school's 

cloud workloads and lower ongoing costs 

substantially. 

"Synology is providing us a way to ensure 

the safety of our data in the cloud," 

concludes Arttu Miettunen. "With Synology, 

we're able to safeguard and restore our 

data in Microsoft 365 services in case of 

accidental deletion or data loss." 

More info: www.synology.com 




MAGAZINE 

21

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

VERITAS BACKUP EXEC 22 

Backup Exec has 

consistently been a top 

data protection choice 

for businesses of all sizes as it 

combines ease of use with an 

impressive range of backup 

and restore services. With each 

new release, Veritas always 

introduces plenty of new 

features and Backup Exec (BE) 

22 is no exception. 

Centre stage is Microsoft 365 

support allowing BE 22 to 

backup and restore Exchange 

Online and OneDrive data. 

Licensing has been simplified 

further as along with the 

Bronze, Silver and Gold 

options, Veritas has introduced a new 

subscription-based service. 

The BE Simple licensing program allows SMBs 

to get running as quickly as possible. It 

consolidates all licenses into a single edition 

with all features enabled and metering is now 

based on instances which can be a physical 

system, a virtual machine or ten Microsoft 365 

users. 

Installation is swift as we loaded BE 22 on a 

Windows Server 2019 host in 20 minutes and 

used its intuitive console to deploy agents to 

our physical Windows servers - Windows Server 

2022 is also supported as a host and backup 

target. It was even easier to add our Hyper-V 

host as after declaring it to BE 22, a remote 

agent was automatically installed while for 

VMware hosts, you provide their IP address and 

credentials. 

Adding our Microsoft 365 account was 

incredibly simple and far easier than for some 

other backup solutions we've tested. To 

authenticate it, we copied the unique device 

code generated by BE 22, used the link 

provided to access our Microsoft 365 account 

and entered the code. 

There's plenty of choice for backup 

destinations with support for physical and virtual 

disks, cloud storage, tape, deduplication stores 

and network shares. Along with creating a local 

backup vault, we defined a large capacity NAS 

share on a Synology NAS by declaring its UNC 

path. 

Microsoft 365 backups require a 

deduplication store and we had no problems 

creating one on the BE 22 host. Valuable 

ransomware protection is provided for Amazon 

cloud storage with support for S3 buckets with 

Object Lock enabled and BE 22 offers further 

data store protection by blocking non-Veritas 

processes from writing to them. 


MAGAZINE 

 

RECOMMENDED 

BE 22 makes light work of job 

creation as you select source 

systems in the console and 

choose a predefined strategy 

from its drop-down menu. These 

include backup to disk or cloud 

and you can add multiple stages 

for local and offsite backup, 

migration to tape and replication 

to other disk stores. 

For Microsoft 365 protection, 

you choose all or selected users, 

groups and public folders and 

decide whether to secure user's 

mailboxes, archive mailboxes 

and OneDrive data. We selected 

our local deduplication store as 

the destination, added a schedule and 

watched BE 22 create a 'Forever Incremental' 

job. 

A key feature is all Microsoft 365 protection 

services are integrated into the main BE 22 

administration console. Furthermore, unlike a 

number of competing products, Veritas allows 

businesses to retain sovereignty over where 

their Microsoft 365 backup data is stored. 

Data restoration is also simple as we could 

view files, folders and volumes on selected 

sources, pick a recovery point and decide 

where to send them. We found Microsoft 365 

recovery equally undemanding as we were able 

to browse our users, check entire mailboxes or 

select items such as a single email and restore 

individual files from their OneDrive accounts. 

Product: Backup Exec 22 

Supplier: Veritas Technologies 

Web site: www.veritas.com 

Sales: +44 (0)800 279 9810 

VERDICT: Backup Exec is one of our favourite business data protection solutions and the new features in this latest version add 

even more appeal. It delivers complete protection for physical, virtual, multi-cloud and hyper-converged environments, integrates 

seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and the new licensing schemes make it very affordable. 




MAGAZINE

T H E S T O R R I E S X I X 

TIME IS 

RUNNING OUT! 

AWARDS CEREMONY 9TH JUNE 2022 

VOTING CLOSES MAY 30TH 

For attendance and sponsorship 

enquiries please contact: 

stuart.leigh@btc.co.uk or lucy.gambazza@btc.co.uk 

WWW.STORAGE-AWARDS.COM


CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG 

FUELLING CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH 

UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG'S MOLECULAR HORIZONS INSTITUTE LEADS THE WAY WITH 

CRYOGENIC ELECTRON MICROSCOPY - SUPPORTED BY A SCALABLE AND AFFORDABLE 

STORAGE PLATFORM 

Scientists at Australia's Molecular 

Horizons Institute are using cryogenic 

electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to 

reveal the wonders of the cellular universe 

and solve the 21st century's most pressing 

health challenges - one molecule at a time. 

Located at the University of Wollongong, 

the new world-class research institute serves 

multidisciplinary teams making discoveries 

in structural biology with state-of-the-art 

imaging technologies. The institute's crown 

jewel is a Thermo Fisher FEI Titan Krios, one 

of the most powerful devices in cryo-EM 

today. In addition, the cryo-EM facility also 

houses a Thermo Fisher FEI Talos Arctica 

and Tecnai T-12 platforms. 

Cryo-EM lets scientists visualise critical 

biomolecules that have long eluded other 

imaging techniques, such as x-ray 

crystallography. And thanks to new 

breakthroughs in microscopes, direct 

electron detectors, and data collection 

software, cryo-EM can now capture images 

of those molecules with atomic precision. 

This "resolution revolution" has led to a 

surge in research activity: in 2021, cryo- 

EM determined over 3,000 new protein 

structures, up from about 550 just five 

years prior. 

Specimen preparation begins with a flash 

freezing process that traps the molecules in 

a thin layer of vitreous ice. Beams of 

electrons are then fired at the frozen 

sample, and the detector beneath captures 

2D images of the molecules frozen in 

various orientations. Advanced software 

analyses and processes those images before 

combining all of the different orientations 

into a single rendering. The result is a highresolution 

3D model displaying the 

molecule's complete structure. 

Seeing these shapes is vital to 

understanding how molecules behave, 

which in turn unlocks the door to new 

interventions in medicine. The scientists 

uncovering these new structures at 

Molecular Horizons are using them to push 

critical health initiatives forward, from 

combatting antimicrobial resistance to 

creating new methods of cancer detection, 

prevention, and treatment. 

Dr. Antoine van Oijen, distinguished 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG 

professor at the University of Wollongong 

and Executive Director at Molecular 

Horizons, reminds us that "Developing new 

cures and therapeutics relies on a 

foundation of fundamental research, 

particularly on the structure and function of 

biological molecules." That fundamental 

research relies on a foundation of its own: 

a data storage platform capable of 

supporting it. 

THE STORAGE CHALLENGE OF 

CRYO-EM 

In the beginning, Molecular Horizons 

attempted to simplify their IT infrastructure 

by taking a commodity approach, so 

commercial off-the-shelf systems comprised 

the cryo-EM facility's original 100 terabytes 

of storage. But once they began ramping up 

research and tuning instruments to drive 

new discoveries, the teams ran into issues 

relating to that storage - such as timeconsuming 

administrative burdens, lowered 

performance, limited scalability, and a lack 

of technical support - that hindered their 

research efforts. 

Consider that an individual raw dataset in 

cryo-EM ranges from 5 to 40 terabytes. The 

institute's imaging devices, which run for 

roughly 80% of the year, operate almost 

24/7 with real-time processing. This means 

that a single cryo-EM microscope can easily 

generate multiple petabytes of data per 

year. And those microscopes can be further 

enhanced by upgrading the direct detectors, 

increasing their data output several fold. 

The bottom line was this: Cryo-EM 

pipelines require a scalable, reliable, and 

high performance data storage platform 

capable of processing vastly growing 

quantities of data. 

When Molecular Horizons realised that 

their commodity storage could not measure 

up to that task, they seized the opportunity 

to rebuild. But while their ambitions were 

limitless, funding, of course, was not (the 

Titan Krios alone is a costly machine, 

carrying a price tag in the range of 

millions). 

SCALABLE AND AFFORDABLE 

Ultimately, the facility needed a storage 

foundation that could support their 

present and future cryo-EM goals - one 

that came with controlled costs, a 

collaborative partnership, and zero 

performance compromises. Panasas 

delivered on all fronts. 

In 2021, Molecular Horizons deployed 

Panasas ActiveStor scale-out storage. 

Beyond the remarkably reasonable cost per 

terabyte, the institute's decision was based 

on Panasas' long-standing expertise in life 

sciences as well as the storage platform's 

exceptional suitability and manageability. 

Since the deployment, researchers have 

found that they can now rapidly store, 

retrieve, and analyse unprecedented 

volumes of data. 

The PanFS parallel file system is 

engineered to expertly handle large 

dataset workflows like those at the cryo- 

EM facility. With its Dynamic Data 

Acceleration technology, PanFS selfmanages 

files by size, placing them on the 

appropriate storage media without the 

need for administrative intervention. This 

tierless, "always hot" storage maximises 

system performance while simultaneously 

eliminating the complexity of tiered 

storage systems. 

Dr. James Bouwer, Director of Cryo-EM, 

spoke directly about how the facility has 

benefited from choosing Panasas: "This will 

allow us to accelerate workloads and store 

important data for our various research 

projects. We're going to get really fast 

access to files, to the active layer. This 

collaboration between two very high-value 

players coming together in true partnership 

will support Australian science in general, 

and more specifically, the University's role in 

furthering our understanding in these 

important areas of science." 

SEEING DOUBLE 

The Panasas data platform automatically 

adjusts to any type of workload that 

researchers can throw at it with no data 

bottlenecks. And since the system is linearly 

scalable, it readily invites upgrades in the 

lab that increase data output. Molecular 

Horizons is currently carrying out one such 

upgrade: they are swapping the K2 

detectors on their Krios and Arctica 

microscopes for K3 detectors, a move which 

will effectively double the throughput of their 

data collection and significantly speed up 

their time to discoveries. With their previous 

storage, they had lacked both the capacity 

and the speed necessary to handle twice as 

much data; with Panasas, the upgrade 

poses no challenge. 

Beyond delivering the storage, Panasas is 

putting their prior cryo-EM experience to 

use and continues to work with Molecular 

Horizons to optimise their workflows. Adam 

Marko, Director of Life Science Solutions at 

Panasas, described the deal as "a true 

collaborative effort, not just a technology 

sale. UOW chose Panasas because it 

needed a collaborative partner and a 

leading-edge technology supplier. Panasas 

will not only be providing infrastructure, but 

also additional engineering expertise to 

optimise workflows and design reference 

architectures." 

Van Oijen summed up the institute's 

partnership with Panasas as an important 

step for the university in establishing 

accessible, reliable cryo-EM for the medical 

sciences: "This area of research is very dataintensive, 

and partnering with Panasas 

represents a big step for us in realising our 

vision in this sector." With Panasas in place, 

Molecular Horizons can carry out their 

transformational research without ever 

having to worry about the storage 

foundation supporting it. 

More info: www.panasas.com 




MAGAZINE 

25

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP BACKUP 

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY? 

IS THE DATA STORAGE INDUSTRY BANGING ITS HEAD AGAINST A BRICK WALL IN ITS ATTEMPTS TO 

PROMOTE BACKUP AND DATA PROTECTION WITH INITIATIVES SUCH AS THE RECENT WORLD 

BACKUP DAY? STORAGE MAGAZINE GATHERED THE THOUGHTS OF A SELECTION OF EXPERTS FROM 

ACROSS THE SECTOR 

As governments around the world 

continue to issue warnings about the 

increased risk of cyber attacks in light 

of ongoing tensions and uncertainty, keeping 

data secure, recoverable and actionable 

remains a top business priority. In fact, 

Gartner predicts that 70 percent of chief 

executive officers are expected to mandate 'a 

culture of organisational resilience' by 2025 

to protect against coincident threats from 

cyber crime and other unexpected events. To 

achieve this resilience, organisations are reevaluating 

their protection strategies and 

increasingly are leveraging the cloud for its 

proven scale, security, and capabilities that 

help safeguard data and reduce cyber risk. 

"The rise in cyber attacks fueled by the 

geopolitical landscape remains a top concern 

for tens of thousands of organisations," 

comments Ash Parikh, CMO, Druva. "As 

organisations navigate this challenging 

situation this World Backup Day, and every 

day, it is imperative their data, applications, 

and business remain resilient." 

BACKUP ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH 

But is having an annual World Backup Day 

actually making a difference, outside of being 

a cheerleading exercise for the industry itself? 




MAGAZINE

ROUNDTABLE: ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP 

"The shift to remote working completely transformed the 

way organisations protect and store their data. Today, 

there is a greater focus on protecting data no matter 

where it lives - on-prem, on the laptops of remote 

employees, in clouds and in SaaS applications. RTOs are 

increasingly shrinking in today's always-on world, with 

goals being set in hours-if not minutes." 

- Joe Noonan, Unitrends and Spanning 

Adrian Moir, Technology Evangelist and 

Principal Engineer at Quest thinks that 

organisations need to have a wider scope: 

"Organisations need to focus on three 

different areas in relation to backup: 

proactiveness acquired through immutability 

and access control, shared cloud security 

responsibilities, and cost optimisation as data 

volumes skyrocket. Recovering data from a 

backup after a ransomware attack is the cure 

to the problem, but prevention will always be 

better than a cure. Data must be secured 

from both a data and an access point of 

view, which can be done through MFA, 

obfuscating data sets, encryption of data sets, 

immutable data, and more. With plenty of 

solution options out there, organisations 

should choose to provide the level of 

immutability and access control needed to 

proactively stop ransomware attacks before 

they happen." 

Rashid Ali, Enterprise Solutions Manager at 

WALLIX says: "We are starting to see more 

businesses each year opting for the cloud as 

a way to replicate and secure their valuable 

data. In fact, more enterprises use the cloud 

for the purpose of backing up files and 

disaster recovery. And this is showing no signs 

of slowing down, with today's hybrid world 

only set to amplify this move. However, simply 

ensuring data backup is not enough, we 

need to see a greater focus on security. While 

cloud service providers have data protection 

embedded in their offerings, organisations 

are still accountable and we need to see a 

greater shift in focus on this. As more 

businesses embrace the cloud and we 

continue to move forward in an ever more 

hybrid world it is likely that cyber threats in the 

cloud will only grow. Organisations need to 

ensure they have peace of mind that their 

data is not only backed up, but that it is safe 

and secure. It is crucial that organisations 

step up their security practices and deploy a 

comprehensive zero trust model as we look 

forward, so that we ensure the security and 

integrity of cloud backups moving forward." 

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND? 

So is a reliance on the cloud the best 

approach? Quest's Moir goes on: "Most 

businesses assume their data security is totally 

in the hands of their cloud providers, which 

can lead to unfortunate situations when data 

is not backed up. This is why organisations 

must follow the shared responsibility model, 

which discourages the 'out of sight, out of 

mind' attitude and reduces the risk of lost 

data. Unfortunately, those following the 

model struggle with backups, because data is 

stored in slow object Blob storage and the 

system is designed for the endpoint user-not 

the IT admin's backup experience. Going 

forward, we expect to see new approaches to 

API's that provide faster data restoration and 

give cloud customers more control and speed 

over their backups." 

Brian Spanswick, CISO at Cohesity agrees 

that too narrow a focus on backup alone will 

not suffice: "Backup is a critical first step to 

data protection, but organisations must think 

strategically and strive for holistic cyber 

resilience, realising that backup is just one 

component of a much larger equation. 

Achieving true cyber resilience means 

developing a comprehensive strategy to 

safeguard digital assets, including integrated 

defensive and recovery measures that give 

organisations the very best chance of 

weathering the storm of a cyber-attack. 

Organisations should investigate a next-gen 

approach to data management that enables 

customers to adopt a 3-2-1 rule to data 

backups, ensure data is encrypted both at 

transit and at rest, enable multi-factor 

authentication, store data in an immutable 

file, and employ zero trust principles. Further, 

recent clean backups that can be quickly 

restored to a recent point in time delivers the 

business continuity required for organisations 

to not only prevent attacks, but continue to 




MAGAZINE 

27

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP BACKUP 

reduce the potential impact if breached." 

As we all know, the last couple of years 

have been unlike anything we've previously 

experienced in terms of working practices and 

managing data protection. Joe Noonan, 

Product Executive, Backup and Disaster 

Recovery for Unitrends and Spanning 

comments: "The shift to remote working 

completely transformed the way organisations 

protect and store their data. Today, there is a 

greater focus on protecting data no matter 

where it lives - on-prem, on the laptops of 

remote employees, in clouds and in SaaS 

applications. Recovery time objectives (RTOs) 

are increasingly shrinking in today's alwayson 

world, with goals being set in hours-if not 

minutes. Cybercriminals have taken 

advantage of the remote and hybrid work 

environments to conduct increasingly 

sophisticated cyberattacks, and the data 

recovery process post-incident has become 

more complex due to new cyber insurance 

requirements. These new regulations include 

critical audits and tests that businesses must 

comply with in order to restore their data and 

receive a payout after an attack - which can 

slow down the recovery process." 

With data protection becoming increasingly 

complex, more organisations are turning to 

vendors that provide what has been 

described as 'Unified BCDR', which includes 

backup and disaster recovery, AI-based 

automation and ransomware safeguards as 

well as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). 

As Noonan says: "Unified BCDR has become 

a necessity due to the growing amount of 

data organisations must protect and the 

increasing number of cyberattacks taking 

place against businesses of all sizes." 

Automation too is increasingly seen as a 

vital component in modern data protection 

strategies. "Backing-up a large network can 

be a complex, time-consuming, repetitive, 

and mundane task, the approach must be to 

just keep calm and continue backing up or 

risk a major catastrophe such as losing 

business data through a cyberattack," says 

Chris Dyke, Sales Director UK & Ireland at 

Allied Telesis. "The answer is to auto-backup 

as part of an autonomous management 

framework. This will ensure that an 

incremental daily back-up of the firmware, 

configuration, and other files important to 

switch operation (such as scripts) are secured. 

They will always be instantly available if 

required to load onto a new network device 

or restore a current device. Auto-backup 

removes a time-consuming task from network 

admins and provides peace-of-mind with the 

knowledge that there is always a complete 

and up-to-date network back-up available." 

TIME TO GET RID OF BACKUP? 

Chris Addis, Vice President of Sales in the UK 

and EMEA at Nasuni has a very different 

perspective: "The vast majority of IT 

professionals we talk to want to get rid of 

backup and its associated headaches and 

challenges. Even in the age of cloud, 

cybersecurity threats associated with data 

such as ransomware are becoming more 

severe and frequent (one happening every 11 

seconds), forcing businesses to think 

differently about their data infrastructure and 

give more consideration to disaster recovery 

plans. Traditional backup technology is 

evolving, but even cloud backup solutions 

have major flaws. The challenges don't end 

there. While centralised enterprise backup 

systems can ingest unstructured data from 

dozens or hundreds of sites, they typically 

utilise central media servers that dedupe and 

compress the data. When a single site goes 

down, that backup server can restore the 

data and access within a business day or so. 

But if an event impacts multiple locations, the 

central backup server can only manage a 

couple of location restores at a time, 

meaning that time to recover (RTO) can easily 

increase from a few hours to multiple days, 

even weeks." 

Addis goes on: "That's why we've created a 

cost-efficient cloud replacement for 

traditional network attached storage and file 

server silos, consolidating file data in easily 

expandable cloud object storage. This way, 

enterprises can restore millions of lost files or 

folders in under a minute. Many of our 

customers across industries end up coming to 

us simply because they're fed up with their 

backup and the 'unglamorous' work that is 

required for it - by leveraging file data 

services they can eliminate the need for 

complex legacy file backup and disaster 

recovery infrastructure." 

Candid Wuest, Acronis VP of Cyber 

Protection Research also feels that a holistic 

view is required: "Attackers don't discriminate 

when it comes to means or targets, so strong 

and reliable security is no longer an option, 

it's a necessity. As the entire world is 

increasingly at risk from different types of 

attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one 

solutions is the only way to achieve truly 

complete cyber protection." 

Jack Bailey, Director of Sales and Channel 

Enablement at iland agrees that simply 

deploying a backup product is no longer 

sufficient - attention needs to be paid to how 

resilient the whole protection process is: "With 

a ransomware event projected every 11 

seconds in 2022 and the rise in the value of 

data, the need for secure, reliable backup will 

become even more critical for an 

organisation to leverage for mission critical 

restorations. As a result of this trend, Backupas-a-Service 

(BaaS) growth is predicted to 

more than double in the next three years. 

Now more than ever, having an airgapped/hardened 

backup target has become 

a must-have. Many ransomware varieties or 

malicious processes will attempt to delete or 

encrypt backup data. Ensuring your 

organisation's backups are protected from 

those threats is an absolute necessity." 

Two years on from the start of the 

pandemic, business data continues to grow 

at an insane pace. As more and more data is 

needed to be stored and secure but available 

24/7, this is having a dramatic effect on what 

organisations are demanding from their 

backup solutions. ST 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: BUSINESS CONTINUITY 

MOVING TO THE CLOUD IS THE BASIS OF A 

GOOD BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN 

A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN IS A THOROUGH AND COMPLEX PLAN TO FIGHT THE EVER- 

PRESENT AND EVER-COSTLY RISK OF DOWNTIME - AND MOVING OPERATIONS TO THE CLOUD 

IS THE BEST SHORTCUT TO TAKE, ARGUES AMIR HASHMI, CEO, AND FOUNDER OF ZSAH 

ABusiness Continuity Plan 

is, broadly speaking, a 

set of processes and 

principles to improve resilience 

and ensure a business can 

continue functioning. Due to 

the importance of IT to 

productivity for almost every 

organisation in the 21st 

century, downtime - when IT 

systems are offline - is its 

antithesis. 

Thanks to the rapid adoption 

of digital tools spurred on by 

the pandemic and the general 

move online we have seen 

throughout the world, there is a 

tremendous amount of risk out 

there for businesses with 

online assets, from 

cyberattacks and 

ransomware 

to natural 

disasters 

and 

power 

outages. However, using cloud-based IT 

assets such as remote desktops, SaaS 

applications, and cloud storage of data 

can be a shortcut to protecting their 

continuity - and therefore the continuity of 

your business. 

According to Veeam's 2021 Data 

Protection Report, the average cost of 

downtime is $84,650 per hour - that's 

$1,410 per minute. Naturally, this figure is 

skewed by larger organisations reporting 

higher sums. Still, small, and medium 

businesses are increasingly impacted as they 

are seen as easier targets - and they have 

far less capital to absorb the blow. 

Although downtime has an infinite 

number of causes, from natural disasters 

to cyberattacks, two factors remain 

consistent: it is costly for modern 

businesses and often preventable. 

The key to this prevention is a good 

business continuity plan. Suppose we 

disregard the part of BCPs that consider 

the physical security of assets and focus on 

the digital continuity of IT systems. In that 

case, we can say that a good BCP focuses 

on three things, and according to IBM, 

these are: 

High availability: The systems provided 

in a business that allows the enterprise 

to have access to applications that allow 

it to still operate even if it experiences 

local failures in areas such as IT, 

processes, and physical facilities. 

Continuous operations: The system a 

business has in place that allows 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: BUSINESS CONTINUITY 

 

business to run smoothly during times 

when disruption or maintenance takes 

place either planned or otherwise. 

Disaster recovery: The system a business 

has in place that allows it to recover its 

data centre at another location safely 

and securely if there is a significant 

event which means the current site either 

damaged beyond repair or inoperable. 

Of course, this is not a universally 

prescriptive solution - as businesses have 

varied sizes and needs, and one size never 

fits all. However, many of these essential 

issues are automatically covered if 

enterprises move storage, desktops, and 

digital tools to the cloud rather than store 

and operate them from on-site servers or 

even on personal devices. 

Firstly, cloud providers automatically 

encrypt and protect your information 

through extensive cybersecurity measures 

and often duplicate it across multiple sites, 

areas, or even time zones to protect it 

against physical or cyber damage. Doing 

this yourself is a costly and time-consuming 

task with huge risks if not done correctly. 

Here, you benefit from the economy of 

scale, as huge deep pockets develop and 

invest in the most thorough, innovative, and 

automated protection measures. This 

means that your data, your applications, 

and therefore the continuity of your 

business is protected from all but the most 

apocalyptic and unforeseen of 

circumstances - including data loss, power 

outages, ransomware attacks, and many 

other causes of downtime. 

You are now (nearly) continuously operable 

and, just as importantly, are operable from 

anywhere. This, in turn, makes hybrid or 

working from home a far-easier and safer 

experience for new and existing members of 

your team - with cybersecurity measures and 

encryption embedded in your teams' 

operating systems and tools, no matter what 

device they use. 

"The cloud is the obvious answer for a company 

that requires always-accessible and always-operational 

data storage and applications. This is true 

whether you use public cloud resources or a dedicated, 

off-premises private cloud server operated 

by a dedicated IT team on your behalf… However, 

if you want to avoid unmonitored cloud usage 

causing a surge in costs, make sure you have the 

resources to dedicate to its use." 

As the ability to hybrid work is seen as an 

expectation of staff across the board, and 

most of the modern, industrialised world, 

making this process more accessible is a 

wise investment to attract and retain future 

employees. 

NO MAGIC BULLET, BUT IT'S A START 

The cloud is the obvious answer for a 

company that requires always-accessible 

and always-operational data storage and 

applications. This is true whether you use 

public cloud resources or a dedicated, offpremises 

private cloud server operated by a 

dedicated IT team on your behalf. 

The cloud is nothing new, and it certainly is 

not a single-point cure to IT pain points. 

Still, it is undoubtedly one of the most 

transformational changes you can make to 

aid both security and operational efficiency. 

However, if you want to avoid unmonitored 

cloud usage causing a surge in costs, make 

sure you have the resources to dedicate to 

its use. Better yet, outsource to experts: an IT 

Managed-Service Provider will ensure that 

your move onto the cloud, and its continued 

use, will be managed effectively. 

More info: www.zsah.net 




MAGAZINE 

31

TECHNOLOGY: DNA STORAGE 

KEYED TO YOUR DNA 

NEIL BALLINGER, HEAD OF EMEA AT AUTOMATION PARTS SUPPLIER EU AUTOMATION, 

DISCUSSES THE BENEFITS OF DNA STORAGE AS A SOLUTION TO DATA ARCHIVAL 

According to Statista, 74 zettabytes of 

data was created globally in 2021, 

which is around a 25 per cent increase 

from 2020. If data creation continues at this 

rate, the current storage solutions will not have 

enough capacity to handle this amount of 

information. As old data storage systems edge 

towards redundancy, alternative technology 

needs to be created. A number of companies, 

such as Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, believe 

the answer to this could lie in our DNA. 

DNA storage would enable molecularlevel 

data storage into synthetic DNA 

molecules using biotechnology advances to 

develop archival storage. Instead of ones 

and zeros, data will now be coded in A, T, 

C and G to make up long chains of 

nucleotides, turning DNA into a new form 

of data storage technology. 

DNA has the capacity to store large amounts 

of data at a density far higher than that of 

current electronic devices. According to 

calculations published by George Church in 

his 2016 book Nature Materials, the DNA of a 

simple bacterium such as E. coli has a storage 

density of around 10 to the power of 19 bits 

per cubic centimetre. This means that just one 

bacterium could store the data generated 

globally in a year. 

Theoretically, DNA data storage is not a new 

concept. However, with the cost of genome 

sequencing decreasing, this new storage 

technology has the potential to become more 

than just a sci-fi fantasy. 

IT'S ALL IN THE GENES 

There are many benefits to the potential 

application of DNA storage. For example, 

using DNA allows for a high storage density to 

volume ratio compared to current storage 

technology. The highest capacity drives 

commercially available are the Nimbus Data 

Exadrive DC series drives. At 100TB, the SSD 

drive has a six to one space-saving ratio, but in 

2012 a successful experiment to store data in 

DNA set the record for the highest-density 

storage medium. 

Using DNA as a storage device allows data 

to be stored with little energy required. Unlike 

current methods that require electricity to 

function, DNA can be stored for 500,000 

years in a fossilised form. This is possible due 

to the incredible stability of DNA molecules, 

making it a highly durable and accurate way 

of storing and archiving data. 

CHALLENGES FOR DNA STORAGE 

The advancements in next-generation 

sequencing technology allow for billions of 

sequences to be read easily and 

simultaneously. The current cost and speed at 

which DNA can be written and read is holding 

the technology back. With the cheapest whole 

human genome sequencing cost said to be 

around 600 dollars or 450 pounds and the 

fastest recorded time for a human genome 

sequencing being around five hours, the 

technology is still far from commercial use. 

DNA storage may not rival technologies such 

as the cloud for distributing and retrieving 

data, but it has the potential to store archival 

data. Despite having limitations in its 

application on the factory floor, this technology 

could help manufacturers by storing sensitive 

data such as financial records, product 

warranty information and other important 

documents in a durable, high density and 

stable way. 

More info: www.euautomation.com/en 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: CYBER-RESILIENCE 

FANTASTIC FOUR 

ERIC HERZOG, CMO AT INFINIDAT, INTRODUCES THE 'FOUR STEPS TO 

HOLISTIC ENTERPRISE STORAGE CYBER-RESILIENCE' 

Digital technology continues to transform 

all aspects of our lives to the point that 

now, after employees, data is a 

company's most valuable asset. It means every 

data storage estate needs to be cyber resilient, 

able to thwart ransomware, malware, internal 

cyber threats, and other potential attacks 

without causing business disruption. 

Security decision-makers inside companies 

usually equate security with firewalls, 

network, and edge protection. They focus on 

how to track the "bad guys" down once they 

have breached the firewall. No organisation 

wants to be hit by cyberattacks and, yet, 

cyber criminals are so sophisticated, there is 

an extremely good chance most will face an 

attack at some point. It is not so much if you 

will be attacked, but when and how often. 

When cyber criminals do attack, the average 

timeframe to identify and contain a data 

breach, according to security analysts, is 287 

days. That is a huge amount of time to alter, 

destroy, or steal data - without alerting 

suspicions. 

Traditional backup methods are no longer 

sufficient and resilience - the ability to bounce 

back quickly - is imperative. Cyber attackers 

will target primary storage and secondary 

storage - backups, replicas, and snapshot. So, 

storage needs to be an essential part of your 

holistic enterprise security strategy, to 

safeguard against attacks, guarantee data 

availability and enable comprehensive data 

restoration for business continuity. 

especially important for companies in 

regulated markets, such financial services, 

pharmaceuticals, and healthcare, or publicly 

traded companies. But what does the storage 

component of your overall cyber security 

strategy look like? 

On the primary storage front, do an analysis 

of your data to determine what data needs to 

be encrypted and what doesn't, then figure out 

how your protection needs keep your company 

in compliance. 

On the secondary storage front, you need 

to decide what to do for modern data 

protection ('backups') and what to do from a 

replication/snapshot perspective for disaster 

recovery and business continuity. In this way, 

cybersecurity goes hand-in-hand with cyberresilience. 

4 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE STORAGE 

CYBER-RESILIENCE 

1. Integrate modern data protection into the 

normal cycle of business, starting with a 

data protection assessment of the company's 

data sources. 

2. Profile all datasets to establish what to 

protect and how. Each dataset brings a 

different value to the company and 

decisions about storage and 

protection need 

to factor in the category each piece falls into ? 

and the value level it either provides or could 

cost the business. 

3. Data needs to be air-gapped, including 

logical local and remote air gapping. Logical 

air gapping creates a gap between the 

source storage and the immutable snapshots, 

while remote air gapping sends data to a 

remote system. 

4. Create a fenced forensic network to provide 

a safe location for complete analysis of 

backup datasets and to identify a copy of the 

data that is free from malware or ransomware 

and can be safely restored. 

When a security incident happens, follow these 

best practice steps: 

Ensure primary storage is clean 

Identify a potential good copy of the data 

and backup datasets 

Set up a fenced network and move the 

potential copy to that network 

Make sure there is no ransomware or 

malware on the data before executing the 

recovery to your primary servers and 

storage infrastructure 

Recover the data 

Continue the process for all appropriate 

datasets. 

More info: www.infinidat.com/en/use-cases 

Creating a holistic enterprise security strategy 

means re-evaluating the relationship between 

cybersecurity, storage, and cyber-resilience. 

Primary and secondary storage needs to be 

protected, ranging from air gapping to realtime 

data encryption to immutable copies of 

your data to instantaneous recovery. This is 




MAGAZINE 

33

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DATA INFRASTRUCTURE 

DECISIONS, DECISIONS 

SIMON SPRING, OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, EMEA AT WHERESCAPE, 

EXPLAINS HOW ORGANISATIONS SHOULD CHOOSE BETWEEN 

DATA HUBS, LAKES & WAREHOUSES 

Identifying and implementing the correct 

data structure is essential for any 

organisation focused on becoming 'data 

driven', and there is no shortage of solutions 

available to satisfy each use case. Whether an 

organisation employs data hubs, lakes or 

warehouses, the core objective is to find the 

best way to effectively ingest and manage data 

that will deliver the insight-driven capabilities 

required. 

It's clear, however, that in making these 

choices some data managers and 

organisations are working with a knowledge 

gap that has the potential to throw plans off 

course. These challenges were brought into 

sharp focus by Gartner's 2020 report: 'Data 

Hubs, Data Lakes and Data Warehouses: How 

They Are Different and Why They Are Better 

Together', which underlines the importance of 

using the right infrastructure for the right 

purpose. 

Often, says the report, there is confusion 

between data lakes, data warehouses and 

data hubs amongst data and analytics 

leaders: "For example, while Gartner client 

inquiries referring to data hubs increased by 

20% from 2018 through 2019, more than 

25% of these inquiries were actually about 

data lake concepts." While confusion is 

understandable, it's increasingly important that 

decision-makers fully appreciate the role of 

each approach and how they can be 

combined to make the most of the huge 

investments being made. 

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE 

So, where do the differences lie and how can 

organisations ensure they are heading down 

the right path? Fundamentally, data 

warehouses should be used to analyse 

structured data, data lakes to analyse 

unstructured or semi-structured data and data 

hubs to communicate the resultant Business 

Intelligence to those who need to act on it. 

The problem is that people work with the 

mistaken belief that these three approaches 

are interchangeable and all accomplish the 

same job but in different ways. It's critical, 

however, that business executives not only 

understand the role of each for themselves but 

also convey it to the rest of the organisation to 

democratise data use. 

For instance, the value of employing data 

lakes and the exploratory technologies that 

unstructured big data enables can only be fully 

realised if the organisations can apply their 

findings in a structured environment. This is 

where the role of the data warehouse 

becomes key in that a data lake can be added 

as a source to a data warehouse, and when its 

data is combined with other real-time and 

batch sources, the result is rich, contextualised 

business insight. 

The role of the data hub is not only to share 

BI, but also to make it available for 

governance by those responsible for it, and as 

the name suggests, enable data flow between 

diverse endpoints. Given its importance, it's 

unfortunate that this is arguably the least 

understood. 

One of the main recommendations of 

Gartner's report is to: "Maximize your ability to 

support a broader range of diverse use cases 

by identifying the ways that these structures can 

be used in combination. For example, data 

can be delivered to analytic structures (Data 

Warehouses and Data Lakes) using a Data 

Hub as a point of mediation and governance." 

COPING WITH COMPLEXITY 

It's inevitable that while the exponential growth 

in the collection, management and analysis of 

data makes more insight available, it also 

means the infrastructure that supports these 

functions must become much more complex. 

Moreover, that infrastructure must adapt as 

new demands continually emerge and as data 

sources periodically evolve. Organisations 

must avoid the assumption that they can 

create a data infrastructure that won't need to 

be changed over time. 

Indeed, the Gartner report points out the 

value of adopting an agile approach to how 

new data from different sources and in 

different formats is ingested. Embracing the 

complexity and disruption this can bring can 

enable organisations to uncover new insight 

and monetise it before their competitors. 

These are important considerations because 

knowledge gaps can also result in conflicting 

expectations whereby those leading the data 

department have different ideas of the role 

and importance of certain infrastructure types 

than those building and using it day-to-day. By 

removing the potential for ambiguity, 

organisations put themselves on a sure footing 

to drive positive impact from their data 

strategies. 

More info: www.wherescape.com 




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ST May-Jun 2022

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