In my previous blog post, the first of this three-part series on NAS replacement, I discussed how caching and the global file system helped me escape the endless NAS investment cycle and enabled me to redirect budget to projects that advanced my company rather than just kept the lights on.
In this second installment, let’s switch gears and discuss infrastructure resiliency!
Why Resilient Infrastructure Is the True Test of IT Leadership
From your end-users to C-Level executives in your organization, no metric will directly influence your reputation as a decision maker and technology leader more than how resilient the solutions you select and implement are. While super-resilient always-on solutions can make you a quiet hero, technology-caused company downtime will quickly turn you into a lightning rod of frustration and lost profit.
Problems will undoubtedly arise, ranging from minor issues like inadvertent data deletion to serious threats to business continuity like ransomware or natural disaster, like we’ve become used to seeing prominently featured in regular news cycles.
Resilient infrastructure is never about a single magic bullet; it involves designing a solution with resiliency prioritized at every layer and having a plan in place to recover quickly from various scenarios and failures.
How vulnerable you are to an attack and its impact are intrinsically linked to your success as a technology department, and more broadly, it affects an organization’s reputation with customers as well.
Building resilient IT infrastructure also demonstrates vision. It keeps you strategic and involves identifying potential failures or vulnerabilities. You must continuously evolve to improve your current posture and anticipate potential issues and opportunities.
As Roman philosopher Seneca said: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” In IT, you make your own luck by meeting a variety of challenges with successful preparation, a hallmark of excellent leadership.
Legacy File Services and NAS just weren’t cutting it
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I purchased CTERA in 2019 to modernize my traditional file services infrastructure. My company used legacy NAS, which despite my best efforts, possessed multiple single points of failure that could (and did) result in users intermittently being unable to access their files.
- Communication issue with a switch? Outage.
- Front-End server issue with CIFS Share presentation? Outage.
- Site connectivity issue? Outage.
- Ransomware attack? Outage.
Creating a more resilient solution with the existing technologies felt like (to quote the great Commander Spock) “trying to construct a memory circuit with bear skins and stone knives.” Incremental improvements are always possible, but the fundamental limitations of legacy file services made dynamic, adaptive, and intelligent resilience far too elusive.
See How CTERA Enhanced My Resilient IT Infrastructure
Here’s how adopting CTERA transformed my IT infrastructure to be significantly more resilient across data protection, service availability, and architectural flexibility:
Data: Before, when a file or folder was missing or overwritten, users had to open a ticket with the necessary details so IT could recover the data from volume snapshots on the NAS, or we would use our tape library to execute a restoration. There was always an inefficient and laborious back and forth to find the right file version. With CTERA, every file save can be a version, accessible for user restoration either via the portal or by using the familiar previous versions tab in Windows Explorer. In addition, antivirus in the cloud and at the edge, with ransomware/AI protection, greatly enhances resilience against attack. Need data locked down from top to bottom? CTERA ensures data immutability at both the file and block storage levels for extreme data protection.
Services: CTERA provides a multitude of access methods that empower a hybrid workforce with varying needs. It’s a resilient engine, giving users multiple entry points for their work and collaboration.
If there are issues accessing SMB to an Edge Filer? No problem, the CTERA Portal can have the entire global file system available with an immersive UI, allowing collaboration, upload, download and a variety of secure sharing options. It’s similarly no problem if an issue arises regarding accessing the Portal. CTERA Edge Filers ensures operational continuity during high latency connectivity or even communication outages. On top of all that, users can use CTERA Drive to locally cache content to their workstations or mobile devices and keep working without direct connectivity, even while on an airplane.
CTERA Edge Filers can be set up using Microsoft DFS, enabling real-time failover to another Edge Filer on standby that won’t consume resources until it needs to take on load.
Architecture: Hybrid cloud architecture is a brilliant step forward in organizational resiliency. Leveraging a combination of cloud, private cloud, and on-premises virtualization enables you to build a Portal and Edge (i.e., hub and spoke) that are capable of weathering any storm.
Being vendor-agnostic has a major advantage in backend storage as well. There are fast and resilient on-premises options available, like Hitachi Vantara or IBM CEPH, or one can select any cloud object storage like AWS S3, Azure Blob, or Wasabi for the best price/resilience mix. With bucket replication, every block you store can reside in multiple regions around the world. Your confidence will continue to grow as the data services feature set will finally keeps pace with the ever-evolving failure and attack vectors.
CTERA even allows for metadata database backups/restoration to/from S3 for 3rd site+ resilience.
Resilient Infrastructure Isn’t Just a Goal, It’s a Differentiator
Your reputation is your uptime, and with CTERA, you have the ever-increasing tools to start creating your own luck, and lots of it.
