How Immutable NAS Offers Cost-Effective Ransomware-Proof Storage for Unstructured Data and Backup Targets

MarketWatch notes that the global network-attached storage (NAS) market will grow at an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 28 percent between 2021 and 2027. Much of that market growth can be attributed to the massive increase in data generated by organizations everywhere. That isn’t much different from the global projections for the cloud storage market—pegged at a CAGR of about 26 percent between 2021 and 2028. Each of these two types of storage has its benefits. For this article, let’s focus on NAS.

NAS is defined as dedicated, centralized file storage that enables multiple users and heterogeneous client devices to retrieve data. There are plenty of good reasons that NAS should be a critical part of your storage strategy. First, NAS is easy to access, so it’s also easy for users to collaborate and share data. NAS also offers scalable capacity and low costs.

Why Immutable NAS?

Immutability is a crucial feature to look for in a NAS solution. According to IDC, organizations should follow the new 3-2-1-1 backup rule, which says to keep three copies of your data, with two copies stored locally on two formats—NAS, tape, or local drive—and one copy stored offsite in secure storage or the cloud. The “1” at the end stands for immutable storage. Immutability is when data is converted to a write-once, read-many-times format that can’t be altered or deleted. Unlike data encryption, there is no key, so there should be no way to “read” or reverse the immutability. For unstructured data and backup targets, NAS with immutability ensures you can recover, even if a ransomware attack is successful.

Why OneXafe Immutable NAS?

OneXafe is an easily managed NAS solution that offers you a scale-out architecture, making it simple to seamlessly add one drive at a time or multiple nodes in a cluster. That means you no longer have to allocate extra storage capacity to compensate for inflexible scale-up legacy storage. OneXafe combines the advantages of a distributed, immutable object-store with the accessibility of SMB and NFS protocols. And OneXafe’s unified architecture reduces management complexity and operational costs for storage while enabling enterprise-level features like global inline deduplication, compression, continuous data protection (CDP), and encryption at rest.

How OneXafe Works

OneXafe’s file system is based on an immutable object store where every object is written only once and never modified. Any modification you make to the file system always results in the creation of new objects. OneXafe CDP takes low-overhead snapshots—a view of the file system at the instant the snapshot was taken—every 90 seconds.

Since the underlying objects are immutable and can't be changed or modified by an external source, the snapshots inherit this immutability. With the snapshots, you can go back to specific points in time and recover entire file systems in minutes, even if ransomware locks your data down.

Whether you’re looking to consolidate file servers, store archival data, or deploy a disk-based backup target, OneXafe is worth a closer look.

Ready to learn more? Watch an on-demand demo or read the solution brief.