Enterprise Storage is not just a Label

I have many anecdotes around the topic of Enterprise Storage, but the conversations in the past 2 weeks made it important for me to share this.

Enterprise Storage is …

Amusing, painful, angry

I get riled up whenever people do not want to be educated about Enterprise Storage. Here are a few that happened in the last 2 weeks.

[ Story #1 ]

A guy was building his own storage for cryptocurrency. He was informed by his supplier that the RAID card was enterprise, and he could get the best performance using “Enterprise” RAID-0.

  • Well, “Enterprise” RAID-0 volume crashed, and he lost all data. Painfully, he said he lost a hefty sum financially

[ Story #2 ]

A media company complained about the reliability of previous storage vendor. The GM was shopping around and was told that there are “Enterprise” SATA drives and the reliability is as good, if not better than SAS drives.

  • The company wanted a fully reliable Enterprise Storage system with 99.999% availability, and yet the SATA interface was not meant to build a more highly reliable enterprise storage. The GM insisted to use “Enterprise” SATA drives for his “enterprise” storage system instead of SAS.  

[ Story #3 ]

An IT admin of a manufacturing company claimed that they had an “Enterprise Storage” system for a few years, and could not figure out why his hard disk drives would die every 12-15 months.

  • He figured out that the drives supplied by his vendor were consumer SATA drives, even though he was told it was an “Enterprise Storage” system when he bought the system.

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Brainy Commvault

[Disclosure: I was invited by Commvault as a Media person and Social Ambassador to their Commvault GO 2019 Conference and also a Tech Field Day eXtra delegate from Oct 13-17, 2019 in the Denver CO, USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The waltz across the Commvault-Hedvig mine field will not be easy. Commvault will have a lot of open discussions about their acquisition of Hedvig and how Hedvig “primary storage platform” will fit into a “secondary storage framework” of Commvault. The outcome of this consummation is yet to appear as a structured form. The storyline will eventually form as Commvault’s diligence to define their strategy moving forward.

Day 1

Day 1 was my open day at Commvault GO. I was absorbing the first impressions of Commvault again even though this was my third Commvault GO, after Washington DC and Nashville in 2017 and 2018 respectively. There was certainly a “startup” feeling again in Commvault since the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO 9 months ago.

A lot of excitement and buzz were generated around the metallic, the Commvault venture into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS solution is targeted at the mid-market for organizations with 500-2500 staff count. Its simplicity and pricing were the 2 things which gave me a good feeling all over. There is even a 45-day trial for metallic.

Getting Brainy

My Day 2 itinerary was more specific because my agenda for this trip was to seek answers to the realization of Commvault-Hedvig.

Commvault took the distinction of using the vision of a DataBrain (#databrain) to define their strategy. From the picture below, the left and right hemisphere of the DataBrain forms the Storage Management piece on the left and Data Management on the right.

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Malaysia, when will you take data privacy seriously?

It is sad. I get about 5-10 silly calls a week and a bunch of nonsense messages in my WhatsApp text and SMS. They waste my time, and it has been going on for years. Even worse is that my private details are out there, exposed and likely be abused too.

Once I got a call from a municipal attorney in the state of Kelantan that I have unpaid summons of several thousand ringgit. They have phone number, my IC number and they threatened to send me a note to arrest me if I didn’t pay up. The thing is, I have never been to Kelantan and I challenged them to send the attorney letter to my home address. The guy on the phone hung up.

In this age where digital information is there at our finger tips, the private details of victims are out there, easily used for unsavoury gains. And we as Malaysians should not shrug our shoulders and not assume that everything is like that, as if it is a Malaysia way of life. That apathy, our state of indifference, should be wiped out from our attitude. We should question the government, the agencies of why is our privacy not protected?

We have the Personal Data Protection Act, ratified in 2010. I don’t know the details of the act, but in its most basic form, don’t you think our private details should at least be protected from the telemarketers calling us selling their personal loans, time share travel suites, private massage (with benefits?) and other silly stuff? How can an act, as a law, be so toothless? Why bother drafting the act, and going through multiple iterations, I would suppose, and making it a law, and yet remain so unworthy to be called a act? Continue reading

“Cloud” hosting hacked – customer data lost

Yes, Yes, I have been inactive for almost 2 months. There were many things I had to do to put my business back into shape again, and hence my lack of activities in my blog.

Yes, Yes, I have a lot of catching up to do, but first I would like to report that one of the more prominent web hosting companies (many of who frequently brand themselves as “Cloud” companies) in Malaysia have been hacked.

I got the news at about 8.00am on September 28th morning and I was in Bangalore, India. Friend of mine buzzed me on Facebook Messenger, and shared with me the following:

Thursday, September 27, 2012 1:46 AM
Date: 27th Sep 2012
Time: 6.01PM GMT +0800

We have an intrusion incident that happened early this morning around 12midnight of 27th September 2012. About 50 customers’ Virtual Machines hosted on our CLOUD were deleted from the cloud server. When we spotted the abnormal behavior, we managed to stop the intruder from causing more damages to our system.

From our initial investigation, we suspect one of our employees who will leave the company at this month end logged into one of our control panels and deleted some Virtual Machines. The backup was terminated at the same time when the Virtual Machines were deleted.

At this point of time, our team is working relentlessly on restoring the affected virtual machines and customer data.

In the mean time, my COO is lodging a police report and my manager is lodging a report to MyCERT while I am writing this email.

We are truly sorry about the whole incident as it has caused a great deal of inconvenience to our customers and their end customers as well.

Please also be rest assured that our CLOUD is truly secured; this incident was not a successful hacking attempt but rather sabotage via an ordinary login.

Detailed investigation reports will be compiled and sent to our customers.

Sincerely,

Chan Kee Siak
Founder and CEO

===================================
Summary / History of issues:
===================================
27th Sep 2012,

1.00am:
- We detected several virtual machines on the cloud were throwing warning signals.
- Technical Managers were immediately informed.

01.30am:
- We found out that an intruder was attempting to delete some of the virtual machines on our CLOUD cluster.
- The intruder was using a valid login to access our CLOUD control panel.
- COO was informed, signed in to co-ordinate.
- The access of the intruder has been disabled to prevent further damage.
- We posted an announcement at: https://support.exabytes.com.my/News/2248/c...aintenance.aspx

02.00am:
- CEO was informed.
- We found out that the intruder was using the login ID and password which belonged to one of the staff members whom we had recently sent out termination notice. The last working day of this staff was end of this month.
- Around 50++ Virtual Machines / VPS were affected.
- We started to inform affected customers.

02.30am:
- Rebuild and restoration of virtual machines began.

10.00am:
- Some Virtual Machines were Restored. The rest were still pending, on going.
- For Virtual machines without extra R1Soft Backup, we have recreated blank virtual machines with Operating System.

12:30pm:
- Attempted to recover the deleted backup on the CLOUD Backup server via data recovery tool. No guarantee and no ETA yet, we were doing our very best.

5.39pm:
- 80% of virtual machines were recreated. However, some were without the latest backup of data.
- Our engineers were attempting to recover the Cloud Backup Hard Drive with the use of recovery tool. However, as the size was huge, it might take few more hours.

Damage:
- The CLOUD Accounts, Virtual Machines and CLOUD Backup of affected clients were deleted. Only client with additional R1Soft backup still has the recent backup.

=================================

Date: 27th September 2012
Time: 1:55 AM GMT+8

Maintenance Details:
We have been alert by our monitoring system that certain Cloud VM has been found to be inaccessible. Our senior admin engineers are now working to resolve the issues.

Maintenance effect:
VMs affected isolated under MY-CLOUD-02 Zone.

We regret for any inconveniences caused.

Best regards,

Support team
------------------
Technical Support Department.

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“Ugly Yellow Box” bought by private equity firm

Security is BIG business, probably even bigger than storage and with more “sex” appeal and pazzazz! My friends are owners of 2 of the biggest security distributors in town, so I know. I am not much of a security guy, but I reason I write about Bluecoat is that this company has something close to my heart.

In the early 2000, NetApp used to have a separate division that is not storage. They have a product called NetCache, which is a web proxy solution. It was a pretty decent product and one of the competitors we frequently encounter on the field was an “ugly yellow box” called CacheFlow. Whenever we see an “ugly yellow box” in a rack, we will immediately know that it was a CacheFlow box. NetApp competed strongly with Cache Flow, partly because their CEO and founder, Brian NeSmith, as we NetAppians were told, was ex-NetApp. And there was some animosity between Brian and NetApp, up to the point that I recalled NetApp’s CEO then, Dan Warmenhoven, declaring that “NetApp will bury CacheFlow!“, or something of that nature. At that point, in the circa of 2001-2002, CacheFlow was indeed in a bit of a rut as well. They suffered heavy losses and was near bankcruptcy. A old news from Forbes confirmed Brian NeSmith’s near-bankcruptcy adventure.

 

CacheFlow survived the rut, changed their name to Bluecoat Systems, and changed their focus from Internet caching to security. Know why they are know as “Bluecoat”? They are the policemen of the Internet, and policemen are men in blue coats. I found an old article from Network World about their change.  And they decided not to paint their boxes yellow anymore. 😉

 

Eventually, it was CacheFlow who triumphed over NetApp. And the irony was NetApp eventually sold the NetCache unit and its technology to BlueCoat in 2006. And hence, that my account of the history of Bluecoat.

Yesterday, Bluecoat was on the history books again, but for a better reason. A private equity firm, Thoma Bravo, has put in USD$1.3 billion to acquire Bluecoat. News here and here.

Have a happy Sunday 😀

No more Huawei-Symantec

Huawei-Symantec is no more. Last night, Huawei, the China telecom giant has bought the remaining 49% of Symantec shares for USD530 million.

The joint venture was initially set up in 2007 to focus on 3S – Server, Storage and Security. With the consolidation under one owner, and one name, Huawei will continue to focus on the 3S. And since Huawei owns telco as well, a lot of the 3S solutions will come into play and it is likely that Huawei will become a cloud player as well.

iSCSI old CHAP

For folks working on iSCSI, especially the typical implementation engineers, they like to have things easy. “Let’s get this thing working so that I can go home” and usually done without the ever important CHAP (Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) enabled and configured.

We are quite lax when it comes to storage security and have always assumed that storage security is inherent in most setup, especially Fibre Channel. Well, let me tell you something, buddy. IT’S NOT! Even Fibre Channel has inherent vulnerability; it’s just that not many technical folks know about the 5 layers of Fibre Channel and it doesn’t mean that Fibre Channel is secure.

As the world turns to more iSCSI implementations, the fastest and easiest way to get a iSCSI connection is to do it without CHAP in the LAN, and CHAP authentication is not enabled by default. And this is happening in the IP world, not Fibre Channel, where there are more sniffers and hackers lurking. But even with CHAP applied, there are ways that CHAP can be broken and iSCSI security can be compromised easily. Below is the typical Windows iSCSI connection screenshot.

First of all, CHAP communication goes through back and forth in the network in clear-text, and the packets are easily captured. Then the hacker can take its own sweet time brute forcing to obtain the CHAP’s encrypted password, challenge and username.

iSCSI communication happens over the popular TCP port of 3260. This gives the hacker a good idea what he/she is able to do. They could sniff out the packets that is going through the wire from their computer but the hacker probably won’t do that. They would use another computer, one that has been compromised and trusted in the network.

From this compromised computer, the hackers would initiate a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. They can easily redirect the iSCSCI packets to this compromised computer to further their agenda. I found a nice diagram from SearchStorage about the iSCSI MITM attack and I shared it below.

A highly popular utility used in MITM attacks is one called Cain and Abel. Using a technique called ARP Cache Poisoning or ARP Poison Routing (APR), the compromised computer is able to intercept the iSCSI communication between the iSCSI initiator and the iSCSI target. The intercepted iSCSI packets can then be analyzed by Wireshark, the free and open source packet analyzer.

As Wireshark is capturing and analyzing the iSCSI packets, all the iSCSI communication that is happening between the initiator and the target is read in clear-text. The IQN number, the username are in clear-text as well. As Wireshark follows the TCP stream, the hacker will be looking out for a variable called “CHAP_N=iscsisecurity” and followed by “CHAP_R which equates to the encrypted password in the CHAP authentication. It will probably be in hexadecimal and begins with “Ox….“.

Voila, your encrypted iSCSI password, which now can be hacked in brute-force offline. It’s that easy folks!

Either way, having configured CHAP enabled is still better than no authentication at all (which most of us are likely to do during iSCSI setup). There are other ways to make the iSCSI communication more secure and IPSec is one of the considerations. But usually, we as techies have to balance between security and performance and we would end up choosing performance, relaxing the security bit.

But the exposure of iSCSI in the IP world is something we should think more about. Instead of having the easy way out, at least enable CHAP, old chap. OK?

NFS version 4

NFS has been around for almost 20 years and is the de-facto network file sharing protocol for Unix and Linux systems. There has been much talk about NFS, especially in version 2 and 3 and IT guys used to joke that NFS stands for “No F*king Security”.

NFS version 4 was different, borrowing ideas from Windows CIFS and Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew File System. And from its inception 11 years ago in IETF RFC 3010 (revised in 2003 with IETF RFC 3530), the notable new features of NFSv4 are:

Performance enhancement – One key enhancement is the introduction of the COMPOUND RPC procedure which allows the NFS client to group together a bunch of file operations into a single request to the NFS server. This not only reduces the network round-trip latency, but also reduces the small little chatters of the smaller file operations.

 

Removing the multiple daemons in NFSv3 – NFSv3 uses various daemons/services and various protocols to do the work. There isportmapper (TCP/UDP 111) which provides the port numbers for mounting and NFS services. There’s the mountd (arbitrary port byportmapper) service that does the mounting of NFS exports for the NFS clients. There’s nfsd on TCP/UDP 2049and so on. The command ‘rpcinfo -p’ below shows all the ports and services related to NFS

 

There are other features as well such as

Firewall friendly – The use ofportmapper dishing out arbitrary ports made it difficult for the firewall. NFSv4 changed that by consolidating most of the TCP/IP services into well-known ports which the security administrator can define in the firewall.

 

Stateful – NFSv3 is stateless and it does not maintain the state of the NFS clients. NFSv4 is stateful and implements a mandatory locking and delegation mechanisms. Leases for locks from the servers to the clients was introduced. A lease is a time-bounded grant for the control of the state of a file and this is implemented through locks.

Mandated Strong Security Architecture – NFSv4 requires the implementation of a strong security mechanism that is based on crytography. Previously the strongest security flavour was AUTH_SYS, which is level 1 clearance.

 "The AUTH_SYS security flavor uses a host-based authentication model
where the client asserts the user's authorization identities using small
integers as user and group identity representations (this is EXACTLY how NFSv3
authenticates by default). Because of the small integer authorization ID
representation, AUTH_SYS can only be used in a name space where all clients and
servers share a uidNumber and gidNumber translation service. A shared translation
service is required because uidNumbers and gidNumbers are passed in the RPC
credential; there is no negotiation of namespace in AUTH_SYS."

NFSv4 security mechanism is based on RPCSEC_GSS, a level 6 clearance. RPCSEC_GSS is an API that is more than an authentication mechanism. It performs integrity checksum and encryption in the entire RPC request and response operations. This is further progressed with the integration of Kerberos v5 for user authentication. This is quite similar to Windows CIFS Kerberos implementation, providing a time-based ticket to gain authentication.

In addition to that, there are many other cool, new features with NFSv4. There was a further extension to NFSv4 last year, in 2010, when NFSv4.1 was added in IETF RFC5661. As quoted in Wikipedia – NFSv4.1 “aims to provide protocol support to take advantage of clustered server deployments including the ability to provide scalable parallel access to files distributed among multiple servers (pNFS extension).

NFSv4 has much to offer. The future is bright.