Tony Pearson IBM Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect, and Content Manager for IBM Systems Technical University events

The end of the year approaches soon.

The developerWorks Connections platform will be sunset on December 31, 2019. On January 1, 2020, this blog will no longer be available. More details available on our FAQ.

In my last post, I mentioned that IBM has decided to sunset this blog and thousands of others. Such endings can give rise to new beginnings. On that thought, we have decided on the following course of action:

New Blog: Tony @ TechU

For me, in my new job role as Content Manager for IBM Z and LinuxONE topics for IBM Systems Technical University, I am launching a new blog called "Tony @ TechU", located at [https://ibmtechu.com/blog/tony]. I have hand-picked a subset of my past blog posts related to my new job role.

Where to go for Storage information

For Chris and Lloyd, there are still discussions underway on where to host new Storage content. We have also requested that this blog remain available in read-only mode until March 31, 2020 so people can see this notice and have a chance to save copies of any historical blog posts they choose.

On behalf of my two colleagues who are enjoying some well-earned time off, I wish all of my readers Happy Holidays!

Tony Pearson IBM Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect, and Content Manager for IBM Systems Technical University events

The end of the year approaches soon.

The developerWorks Connections platform will be sunset on December 31, 2019. On January 1, 2020, this blog will no longer be available. More details available on our FAQ.

In my last post, I mentioned that IBM has decided to sunset this blog and thousands of others. Such endings can give rise to new beginnings. On that thought, we have decided on the following course of action:

New Blog: Tony @ TechU

For me, in my new job role as Content Manager for IBM Z and LinuxONE topics for IBM Systems Technical University, I am launching a new blog called "Tony @ TechU", located at [https://ibmtechu.com/blog/tony]. I have hand-picked a subset of my past blog posts related to my new job role.

Where to go for Storage information

For Chris and Lloyd, there are still discussions underway on where to host new Storage content. We have also requested that this blog remain available in read-only mode until March 31, 2020 so people can see this notice and have a chance to save copies of any historical blog posts they choose.

On behalf of my two colleagues who are enjoying some well-earned time off, I wish all of my readers Happy Holidays!

Tony Pearson IBM Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect, and Content Manager for IBM Systems Technical University events

Well this week is Thanksgiving Holiday here in the USA, and I personally am thankful to all my readers of this blog. Here are the rankings pulled last month. Thanks to all of you, this blog has been ranked #1 since 2011 and has remained number one every since.

Rank	Blog	Author(s)	Views since 2013
1	Inside System Storage	Tony Pearson, Chris Vollmar, and Lloyd Dean	70,727,894
2	Notes from Rational Support	Kelly Puffs	58,290,641
3	Application Performance Management	APM Community	54,762,369
4	Asset Management	Maximo Community	54,736,719
5	Application Integration Middleware Support	Maryam Ahmed	35,120,243
6	Keep on Learning	Susan Visser	24,442,013
7	Thoughts from Support	Andrew McC	22,749,612
9	Chris’s AIX Blog	Chris Gibson	22,236,874
10	Ingolf’s z/VSE Blog	Ingolf Salm, Jens Remus	21,135,352

While I have been blogging for over 13 years (since September of 2006!) the number of views were not started tracking until mid 2013. Of 70 million listed above, this blog got about 15 million views in the past 12 months.

(Internally, IBM values each blog at $5.00 USD per thousand views, or 0.5 cents per view, in marketing value to the company. At that rate, this blog provided about $75,000 USD in marketing value to the IBM Systems and IBM System Storage brand these past 12 months!)

Sadly, IBM has given notice that this blog, and thousands others, will be going away at the end of this year. At least this blog will retire as a champion, joining the likes of retired athletes Mark Spitz, Rocky Marciano, Joe DiMaggio, Michael Strahan, Pete Sampras, and John Elway.

If you read blog posts through an RSS feed reader, you may not have noticed the ominous IBM warning that looks like this:

The developerWorks Connections platform will be sunset on December 31, 2019. On January 1, 2020, this blog will no longer be available. More details available on our FAQ.

For those who have not read this FAQ yet, here is the TL;DR summary:

Q.Why are these Connections pages going away?
A. IBM is consolidating major content portals to improve the customer experience.

Q.What will happen to the information that is currently published on developerWorks Connections? Where will I be able to find it?
A. Existing content and posts will be reviewed by the content owners and moved...

Q.Can I receive a copy of all of the content that has been published?
A. Unfortunately due to technical constraints of this product, we are unable to provide that service...

Over the past 13 years, this blog has been moved from one software platform to another. We went from Roller, to Akamai, to IBM Connections. Each time, the developerWorks team had lined up a new software platform, and helped to move each individual blog from old to new.

In the process, we lost some of the formatting and external media, like photos and graphics. I have found in some cases new-line characters that separate lines were removed, causing some words to get merged together. I use a spell checker to find them.

This time is different because [IBM Connections software was sold to HCL Technologies] and I suspect IBM did not want to pay to have them continue.

(The phrase "consolidating major content portals to improve the customer experience" reminds me how countries like Russia and China simplify news for their citizens by having a single state-run newspaper and and a single state-run television station. Can you imagine an American say they want fewer choices, fewer television channels, fewer radio stations, fewer books to read?)

Instead of thousands of individual blogs focused on specific topics, each reflecting the un-edited voice of the blogger in his or her own style and personality, the alternatives proposed for new content are now reduced. Officially, IBM recommends community/multi-author blogs in fewer, broader categories, where posts are reviewed, edited and censored by a committee. These are available today for a handful of broad categories:

• www.ibm.com/community/

  For IBM Community blogs, there are 12 broad categories: Automation, Business Analytics, Data Science, Governance and Integration, Hybrid Data Management, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, Internet of Things, Marketing and Commerce, Middleware, Security, Supply Chain, IBM Z and LinuxONE.

• www.ibm.com/mysupport/

  For IBM Support offers Fix Central, Notifications on individual product lines, and IBM Support Guide.

If neither of these two alternatives strike you as the most obvious place to move "Inside System Storage", you are not alone.

Many of you have told me that particular blog posts helped you close a deal, address a particular client situation, or inspired you to learn new skills. If you want to download any of the posts from this blog, or the posts of any other blogs on IBM developerWorks before they disappear, you can do this from your browser and use "Save As" to create an HTML file for each post or view.

(Or better yet, I have done much of this for you, which I have collected in a series of books, Inside System Storage Volume I through V, available from my publisher Lulu, available here: [Books published by Tony Pearson].)

If you run Red Hat Linux like I do, the "wget" command can help automate this for you. Here is an example script that pulls down monthly HTML files (all the posts for the month in a single HTML file) for the year 2018, resulting in 12 HTML files in total:

for i in `seq 201801 201812`;
do
echo "Processing month: $i"
wget -O $i.html "https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/date/$i?lang=en&maxresults=50"
done

Chris, Lloyd and I are reviewing various options, in discussions with marketing and other teams, and hope to announce something before December 31.

Tony Pearson IBM Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect, and Event Content Manager

(Guest Post: This is a guest post written by Tony Sater, IBM.)

Cyber resiliency is an organization’s ability to continue delivering the intended outcomes despite adverse cyber incidents. Cyber resiliency, Business Continuity and Disaster Recover share a common goal of protecting your data. Where cyber resiliency stands out is the confidence that the copy of revenue producing data, that would be used to restore a business from a cyber incident, has not been modified since it was ingested and can be reliably used to reduce the impact of a business outage due to a compromising attack.

Organizations are beginning to understand that traditional device-centric and technology-centric security measures, such as firewalls, fail to provide security in a Hybrid Multicloud cyber ecosystem. Moving forward, one must take a holistic approach across their data, applications, and the entire infrastructure to defend against and recover from a cyber-attack.

In order to more effectively deal with cyber events, the National Institution of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a policy framework of computer security guidance for how organizations can assess and improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber-attacks. This framework is an industry accepted methodology for building a plan to develop and implement safeguards to ensure delivery of critical business services.

Storage has for a long time played the role of “data custodian” in enterprise operations. In addition to providing containers where data goes when not in main memory, the system storage layer has traditionally provided protection solutions to recover from unusual events such as natural disasters, deliberate cyber-attacks, or accidental data loss or corruption. Over time, the range and sophistication of storage-based cyber resilience solutions has grown:

• Backup. Since the 1960s, storage has allowed application users to save a version of data on separate media to protect from accidental deletion, corruption, or primary device failure.
   
• High availability. Starting in the 1990s, storage began providing ways to keep data and systems available after failures, such as multi-path access, multi-server access, and duplication of data copies.
   
• Disaster Recovery. From the late 1990’s on, storage has provided designs to create replicated copies of active data at distances sufficient to protect from power outage or regional disasters like earthquakes, floods, or fire.
   
• Fast recovery on-line data recovery. And within the past 10 years, storage began providing snapshot copies of data for rapid recovery from accidental deletion or data corruption. IBM Storage provides all these traditional cyber resilience capabilities, but new data security threats are constantly surfacing. For example, Logical Data Corruption (LDC) through cyber-attack from ransomware and other rapidly evolving technologies presents a new set of protection considerations. To provide the needed level of protection, IBM Storage cyber resilience solutions leverage the storage tools already in place for backup and disaster recovery, plus many new storage innovations that improve on traditional technologies and address new threats.

Let’s take a look at some of the IBM Storage for Cyber Resiliency capabilities and solutions.

IBM DS8880 Safeguarded Copy prevents sensitive point in time copies of data from being modified or deleted due to user errors, malicious destruction or ransomware attacks. Here’s how it works. Safeguarded Copy provides functionality to create up to 500 recovery points for a production volume. These recovery points are called Safeguarded Backups. The Safeguarded Backups are immutable, hidden and non-addressable by a host. The data within these backups can only be used after a Safeguarded Backup is recovered to a separate recovery volume providing a "logical air gap" functionality. Finally, these recovery volumes can be accessed using a recovery system and used to restore production data, providing a rapid and operational recovery capability.

IBM Tape Storage offers a cost effective, long term backup and archive WORM storage, with a true physical air gap and total separation from ransomware and cyber-attacks. Tape is used to optimize data protection costs and mitigates the risk of ransomware for data-centric organizations. At a cost of less than a half a cent per GB (Gigabyte), it is also an extremely cost-effective solution.

IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus can store backup data in all storage pools such as disk, tape, object and more. IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center using backup data analysis can alert admins for any suspicious activity. Our Spectrum Protect portfolio delivers pervasive, end to end encryption capabilities. Customers utilize Spectrum Protect Node replication to replicate the spectrum protect data to the isolated location such as WORM Tape media. Furthermore, these backup copies can be sent to a physically secure off-site location. IBM Spectrum CDM also supports snapshots as well, which is the traditional backup and recovery method that delivers the lowest RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

IBM delivers four key capabilities of cyber resiliency that delivers across block, file, object, tape, software-defined storage, and cloud.

• Isolation is the degree of separation of snapshot or backup data from the rest of the network. Isolation can be achieved though logical means by utilizing DS8000 Safeguarded Copies or IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) with IBM Resiliency Orchestrator. Isolation can also be achieved through a physical air gap with IBM Physical Tape and Spectrum Protect.
   
• Immutability, or tamper-proof storage, prevents any attacker, external or internal, from changing or deleting data. IBM offers multiple WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage solutions such as DS8000 Safeguarded Copies, WORM Tape, Spectrum Scale Immutable file sets, IBM COS retention vaults, and Spectrum Protect for data retention.
   
• Performance is an important capability of the cyber resilience framework. How fast can your organization recover from a cyber-attack? While tape excels at isolation and immutability of your backup data, it can take several hours for recovery. For those companies that need to recover in minutes instead of hours, IBM offers high performing recovery options with DS8000 Safeguarded Copy and the Spectrum Protect family.
   
• Ease of reuse or the ease of access to your backup data is important for testing recovery procedures, validating backups, and restoring data into a sandbox environment to find a valid recovery point in the event of a ransomware incident. DS8000 Safeguarded Copy and Spectrum Protect Plus provide instant restore capabilities to get your organization back on its feet.

The pain points that organizations face are evolving as cyber-attacks increase. There is a need for a more precise, immediate response to cyber events. This response, to be effective, needs to be planned, prepared and tested well before experiencing a live attack, where the stress and pressure of the attack overwhelms the organization as it tries to recover. Data storage systems and technologies lie at the heart of efforts to build IT environments that are resilient to logical data corruption in all its forms. IBM Storage offers a broad spectrum of market-leading cyber resilience solutions that help 21st century business survive and thrive.

For more information about IBM’s Storage for Cyber Resiliency, please read [Mainframe Storage for IBM Z].