Cleondris, the perfect companion for NetApp data protection deployments

Cleondris, a Swiss software company developing add-ons for NetApp systems, joined for the first time The IT Press Tour, the 47th edition, a few days ago in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the perfect opportunity to meet Christian Plattner, CEO and founder, for me it was the second as I discovered the company and met Christian at NetApp Insight 2018 in Las Vegas.

The company, founded in 2006 in Zurich, Switzerland, was launched with the mission to offer special software for ONTAP and to deliver these solutions for each NetApp product iteration like Clustered ONTAP, SnapDiff or SnapMirror. Today, 3 products are available: SnapGuard, Data Manager and Cleondris HCC.

• SnapGuard targets ransomware with the capability to potentially block usual requests via FPolicy module on ONTAP. It implements a sort of firewall for NFS and SMB file access.
• Cleondris Data Manager (CDM) is an orchestrator for NetApp snapshot mechanism and controls how you backup and restore any ONTAP-based filer.
• HCC is a special add-on for SolidFire when users deploy a cluster. It facilitates failover of VM-based workloads hosted in such clusters. This product is on NetApp price list but it is sold only to users with already deployed SolidFire, outside of these, the NetApp product is end of life.

All Cleondris solutions rely on the Cleondris Appliance, a VM-based appliance, running CentOS, PostgreSQL and other Cleondris specific Java Software.

The appliance supports VMware OVA, Linux RHEL/CentOS and physical server and is potentially available on demand on AWS and as a Docker container. AWS will be officially available soon and the product already supports Amazon FSx for NetApp.

CDM offers a comprehensive GUI to schedule SnapMirror and is capable of restoring VMware objects with a fine granularity: Full VM restore, VM clone, VMDK restore, VMDK attach to offer file-level restore, Datastore clone and DR with HCC. Of course NDMP control is integrated as well. Cleondris is able to monitor all data movements coupled with vCenter and both source and target storage devices. As Cleondris Data Manager sits in the back and monitors all Snapshots and SnapMirrors jobs, CDM is the right tool to globally see all protection tasks and trigger any restore. CDM is capable to index all files on any ONTAP volumes and thus know perfectly if all files are protected by a Snapshot or SnapMirror jobs and present in a “backup” image, tracking also versions. Cleondris belongs to the small list of official partners for SnapDiff v3. In terms of scalability, 1 Cleondris instance is able to support 10 of thousands of VMs and hundreds of NetApp clusters.

SnapGuard illustrates perfectly the pioneer role of Cleondris in ransomware protection for NetApp systems. It is available for FAS, AFF, Select, CVO and Amazon FSx for ONTAP. This module is able to scan 300k FPolicy messages and 16k ransomware checks per second and CPU core. The effect is powerful with immediate blocking mode with export to SIEM solutions for advanced analysis.

Cleondris is licensed per ONTAP or ESXi node whatever is the volume of data or number of users or number of ONTAP volumes.

Clearly a must have for any ONTAP user as the Cleondris suite of tools enhanced NetApp environment, already demonstrated at hundreds of sites. It was a very good dense session presented by Christian Plattner.