IBM Storage Insights Boosts AI-Driven Ransomware Protection with Firm's Storage Defender Integration

By Ramakrishna Vadla, storage system management specialist, IBM Corp.

IBM Storage Insights changes the way enterprise organizations manage and optimize their storage environments by leveraging AIOps and self-healing infrastructure services. New release enhances protection from ransomware threats by integrating with IBM Storage Defender and simplifies storage management using IBM Flash Grid technology. The following sections cover the features released in June 2024.

Integrates with IBM Storage Defender to protect from ransomware threats

The latest 4th gen of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology introduces advanced AI capabilities to the IBM Storage Flash System family. FCM4 drives analyze every IO for multiple threat vectors and send signals to IBM Storage Insights Pro. Ransomware-infected volumes and copies are marked as compromised during threat assessment to prevent their use in application recovery. Storage Insights automatically forward ransomware alerts to IBM Storage Defender for further evaluation alongside other signals from servers, assisting users in determining appropriate actions.

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Integration with Storage Defender provides robust end-to-end data resilience for both primary and secondary workloads, enabling early cyber threat detection and advanced notifications that help mitigate potential damage. This proactive approach enhances enterprise security and significantly reduces recovery time, ensuring quick business recovery from cyber incidents. The combination of Storage Flash’s AI-driven threat detection with AI-powered Storage Insights Pro and Storage Defender creates a powerful tool for safeguarding critical data and maintaining operational continuity.

Additionally, Storage Insights supports integration with security ecosystem services such as IBM Cloud Paks for Security (IBM QRadar) and ServiceNow using REST API and Webhook technology. This comprehensive integration fortifies the security posture of enterprises and streamlines threat management processes.

Flash Grid navigation and storage partition migration

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You can now migrate storage partitions between IBM Storage Flash devices without any application downtime, ensuring a smooth and non-disruptive transition.

Storage Insights, in conjunction with IBM Storage Virtualize 8.7.0, offers enhanced features to meet the growing demand for advanced storage solutions. With the introduction of Flash Grid and Storage Partition migration, it addresses workload mobility needs while providing a comprehensive view of global estates across multiple Flash Grids and a personalized view for individual Flash Grids. Additionally, it supports Storage Partition topology, facilitating migration initiation and monitoring.

Benefits include:

Non-disruptive migration: Migrate storage partitions between IBM Storage Flash System devices without any application downtime, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted transition.
Simplified upgrades: Easily relocate storage partitions to new systems for hardware upgrades, load balancing, or specific data center requirements.
Optimized resource allocation: Balance workloads by migrating partitions from overloaded systems to underutilized ones, optimizing resource use.
Centralized management: Initiate, track, and manage partition migrations directly within the familiar Storage Insights interface.

Storage Insights thus empowers businesses to maintain operational continuity, improve efficiency, and enhance flexibility in their IT infrastructure management.

AI-powered workload placement advisory
Storage Insights introduces the AI-powered ‘Workload Placement Advisory’ feature for the IBM Storage Flash System family, designed to assist storage planners in provisioning storage for new applications (workloads).

When adding new workloads, storage planners often need to determine:

Whether existing systems are fully utilized and if the new workload can be accommodated within the current fleet.
Which existing system would be best suited to handle the new workload.
How long the new workload can be supported by the existing fleet, potentially deferring additional procurement costs.

Traditionally, these decisions rely on the administrator’s expertise, best practices, and thumb rules, which can be conservative and lack confidence due to limited awareness of the current state of different systems.

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The Workload Placement Advisory feature addresses this by allowing users to model various scenarios with different workload characteristics, planning durations, and system search spaces. It evaluates the fitment of existing systems and ranks them based on their suitability, supported by detailed explanations of key performance indicators (KPIs) that influence the ranking process. This empowers storage planners to make informed, confident decisions about workload placement and system utilization.

Create security threats as incidents in ServiceNow
Storage Insights is now integrated with ServiceNow for all ransomware-related incidents. This integration facilitates real-time communication between the 2 platforms via Webhook endpoint configuration and supports multiple authentication modes. Real-time ransomware alerts from Storage Insights are automatically reflected as incidents on ServiceNow dashboards, enabling prompt corrective actions on the underlying block controllers.

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