Explore! - CentricStor documentation and download

These 2 White Papers are available only for customers of Fujitsu Siemens Computers. Please contact your sales. If you are not a customer yet please send an email with your complete contact data to CentricStor and specify which document you wish to receive.

CentricStor Long Distance Connection

Abstract: Today's IT managers are obliged to deal with the issue of “disaster recovery” (DR). The need to implement an effective DR policy is usually in the self-interest of any company anyway, but is also driven in part by additional external requirements. Various general external requirements can be derived from the Basle II Accord or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), for example.
For this reason suitable organizational and technical measures must be taken in order to reduce effects of catastrophic incidents to a minimum by adopting state-of-the-art solutions. To protect against such situations it is necessary to replicate the data to other (more remote) sites. DR strategies are always designed on the basis of a certain geographical separation between local and remote sites. How great the distances have to be in a particular case depends on the risk assessment and possibly on external factors. In practice, distances range from a few kilometers to several thousand kilometers.
CentricStor is ideally suited to fulfilling all of today's practical DR requirements in the backup environment (in particular data replication from the local site to more remote sites). At the same time, however, the technical parameters/general conditions and costs need to be reconciled with the service level requirements.
The aim of the present white paper is to describe the necessary technical fundamentals as well as to present suitable configurations or the possible optimization approaches.

Security Aspects in CentricStor environments

Abstract: Secure management of data and secure system operation are subject to increasingly stringent requirements. As well as maximum data availability it is also imperative to ensure access security at all times. Access security not only means verifying access rights and logging actions; it also extends to ensuring data is protected against unauthorized access even if the data material were to fall into the wrong hands. Examples in this area are the loss or theft of data media during physical transport outside a secure environment. It also includes data being intercepted during an online transfer. Both these critical operations are often to be encountered in backup applications with disaster recovery strategies.
Suitable measures must be taken in order to enable the requirements for secure CentricStor operation and secure data management to be fulfilled. In reference architectures such measures are described by the terms “Availability, Integrity, Accountability and Confidentiality” These measures have to be implemented at the different CentricStor levels
• Secure CentricStor administration
• Secure CentricStor remote support (including maintenance)
Guaranteeing access protection for backup data on transportable media or during online transfer to remote sites
The aim of the White Paper is essentially to illustrate the usage scenarios and the background to access security in the CentricStor environment. With this aim in view, the white paper focuses on the one hand on the encrypted output of backup data to the backup media as well as on encrypted transfer within disaster recovery configurations using CentricStor. On the other hand it is also shown that the CentricStor system itself implements suitable access security measures in order to be able to ensure secure operation.

Revision: November 4, 2008