Cloud Storage Security Challenge: Disaster Recovery

A week ago, our first cloud storage challenge officially came to a close and we were happy, but far from surprised, to announce that nobody won the challenge. We then proved that we didn’t game the system and revealed the prize file.

In our security challenge details page we describe the setup process, which included installing a Filer, writing the prize data, and then later destroying the Filer.  To provide the proof of the prize file, we had to recover the destroyed Filer.

So, what does it take to recover a destroyed Filer?

Five simple steps and 13 minutes in all. That’s it. That’s how long it takes to recover a Nasuni Filer regardless of the amount of data stored in it.

Let’s walk through the steps.

1. Download a copy of the Filer. The file is < 200MB so, depending on your download bandiwdth, this should take about five minutes. Regardless of which version of the Filer you used to write the data originally, you’ll just download the latest version to restore.

2. Uncompress the image. This takes two minutes.

3. Launch VMware and open the Nasuni Filer .VMX file (we used VMware workstation), then perform initial installation answering basic network questions. No more than two minutes.

4. Browse to setup wizard and perform recovery process. Another two minutes.

a. First login with the same Nasuni.com account:

b. Next the Filer will ask if you’re trying to recover a lost Filer:

c. Now you either get the keys back from escrow, or (if you escrowed keys yourself), just upload them directly:

d. After uploading your key, setup a local account for Filer management by entering a username and password.  With that, your recovery is complete. Your data is instantly available through caching and thin provisioning.

5. Now that the Filer is up and running, all that’s left to do is mount it in Windows, and then find and open the prize file. Again, this should take two minutes.

a. Mount the Filer:

b. Browse through the Filer for the prize file (there are no noticeable delays as you browse and access these files):

c. Wasn’t music or videos...maybe a picture?

And here it is:

Note that we assumed you have VMware installed already. If not, VMware installation is a simple process. If we wanted to make this whole process go faster we’d keep a copy of the Nasuni Filer install package around locally. The download was the longest step in the entire process.

In the coming month we’ll focus more on the magic of disaster recovery with the Nasuni Filer. Stay tuned for more details.