DataCore awarded patent for its data protection architecture

A key technology covered by the patent includes elements of DataCore’s continuous data protection technology. CDP is used to protect and recover corrupted data when disruptive events occur, allowing IT to go back to any point in history. It is ideal protection against growing threats such as ransomware, and can be considered as an infinite recovery point objective (RPO) solution with a zero-recovery time objective (RTO).

As ransomware increasingly affects businesses and government entities, those seeking adequate protection must incorporate a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy. Traditional backup software is becoming too complex, unreliable, and requires continuous oversight and management. If ransomware breaks through a company’s defenses and is holding data hostage, recovery often requires a certain amount of downtime and logistics.

With continuous data protection, the system captures data changes in real-time, before they are written to disk. It is then copied synchronously and/or asynchronously to a mirror in the same data centre, inside a metro cluster, to a remote location—which can be a completely different storage system than the primary, including hyper-converged, x86-based JBOD, cloud or other form of secondary storage. Once set up, it runs all of the time to avoid the hassles of nightly backups and more complex snapshot management.

By incorporating continuous data protection, the DataCore software-defined storage platform provides one of the most comprehensive recovery strategies in a ransomware attack or other disaster as it enables restoring a system to a previous state second by second, data block by data block. This allows users to restore systems and data on a continuous timeline into the past—meaning exactly the second before the ransomware hijacked it.

As an added advantage, in the event of failure in the primary system, the DataCore platform completes an automatic, transparent re-direct of I/O traffic to the mirror. When the primary system goes back on line, it syncs the data and automatically falls back, with no IT intervention, in a way that is completely transparent to applications and users.

“Every storage system today needs to provide high availability and rapid disaster recovery. DataCore’s unique CDP technology, backed by the awarded patent and in use for years in many production environments, provides unparalleled capabilities and flexibility, allowing IT organizations to choose the right architecture for their needs by taking advantage of different types and brands of storage devices,” said Nick Connolly, Chief Scientist, DataCore Software. “This patent is yet another demonstration of DataCore’s authority in the software-defined storage space.”