Nebulon claims ransomware recovery in minutes

Inside its Pods though

Nebulon has claimed its TimeJump product can provide complete server and storage ransomware attack recovery in less than four minutes, yet its EULA says customers are responsible for backing up their data, and Nebulon admits external storage outside its Pods are not included in its 4-minute claim

The company’s smart infrastructure relies on cloud-managed Server Processing Unit (SPU) hardware that provisions and manages a server’s OS and other infrastructure software. SPUs provide shared and local data services, including  dedupe, compression, erasure coding, encryption, snapshots, and mirroring at all-flash array latency. Servers with SPUs are grouped into Pods.

Nebulon CEO Siamak Nazari said: “Our solution can both minimize the data services attack surface for ransomware, as well as help simply and quickly recover in under four minutes – an industry first we are proud to be a part of.”

(Image - Nebulon’s SPU.)

Nebulon says TimeJump is “the first and only combined server and storage system built to offer complete ransomware recovery in less than four minutes.” 

Enthusiastic customer Damon Dance, director of sales for Inca Cloud, said: “Nebulon is our antidote to the paradox of management tools depending on the infrastructure they manage. If/when our infrastructure is ever compromised, Nebulon TimeJump will get our infrastructure back up and running so we can restore operations in minutes. No other combined server and storage solution on the market can do this that quickly.”

To me “complete ransomware recovery” indicates that all of a customers’ compromised systems and data are recovered in four minutes if they use Nebulon’s smart infrastructure and TimeJump. Martin Cooper, Head of Customer Experience at Nebulon, said: “All data hosted on the Nebulon system is protected, nothing is excluded.”

Nebulon’s announcement also says its “isolated compute and storage security domains prevent ransomware from infecting the data protection software that enables reliable recovery of the operating system and application data.”  

What data protection software is Nebulon talking about here? Its own? The only data protection mentioned in its data services are snapshots and not backups. Cooper said: “The data protection component of software that is protected by an isolated computer and security domain is the Nebulon operating system, NebOS. The recovery procedure is using our snapshot technology to recover customer data. Our solution is hosting both boot LUNs as well as application data volumes.”

He expanded on this: “We do not offer an ‘off box’ backup software story like Veeam, Commvault, and others. What we do is to utilize our snapshotting technology to recover copies of a customer’s OS and application data, this recovery process is driven by the NebulonON cloud control plane.”

Cooper explained that, in a cluster of servers managed by Nebulon, a Pod, Nebulon’s software creates Boot and data volumes, using the locally attached SSDs on the servers, and these are completely protected by TimeJump with recovery in four minutes or less. But: “We are not making a play where we extend our protection to external storage arrays.”

In other words, TimeJump’s four-minute recovery is limited to servers, and their directly attached SSDs inside a Nebulon Pod, and does not cover data in external storage arrays linked to servers.

Backups and the EULA

Nebulon’s EULA states “5.4 Backup Copies. Nebulon is not responsible for the backup storage of Customer’s data. Accordingly, Customer shall be responsible for the backup of its data and Customer assumes responsibility for any loss or damage from its failure to so maintain backup copies.”

This clearly implies that Nebulon is not responsible for the backup storage of a customer’s data and therefore it cannot restore customers’ backed-up data because the customer’s backup software or service is needed for that. It seems clear that, in order for customer to have “complete ransomware recovery,” this backed-up data needs restoring and Nebulon cannot do it. In this circumstance it cannot offer general “complete ransomware recovery in less than four minutes.”