The BlackPearl Nearline solution provides safeguards to protect against outside threats to your data. These features are critical to maintaining control of data in the case of ransomware attacks. Immutable data snapshots, generated by trigger or on a configurable schedule, allow you to restore your data to a moment in time before the attack.
The BlackPearl user interface is used to perform configuration and management tasks on the BlackPearl NAS solution. It also lets you monitor the hardware and view system messages.
The BlackPearl NAS solution can be configured, monitored, and maintained using a command line interface. The command line interface is documented in the Spectra BlackPearl NAS Solution Command Line Interface Guide.
The BlackPearl NAS solution can be configured over an Ethernet network using a standard web browser.
The operating system is hosted on two mirrored drives.
The BlackPearl system now offers multi-factor authentication, which enhances the security of your BlackPearl system by using Google Authenticator to confirm the identity of any user trying to log in to the BlackPearl user interface. This prevents unauthorized access to the system even if the user credentials needed to access the system are compromised.
The BlackPearl chassis are designed to mount in a standard 4-post, 19-inch (48.3 cm) rack using just 2U (3.5 inches, 8.9 cm) or 4U (7 inches, 17.8 cm) of rack space, depending on the size of the solution. Rack-mounting hardware is included with each BlackPearl NAS solution.
The BlackPearl NAS solution has mirrored system drives and replicates the data on the system drives to all data pools. If one or both boot drives fail, the solution recovers automatically when replacement boot drives are installed.
The solution features N+1 redundant power supplies and data drives that are hot-swappable for uninterrupted operation. Any data drives not configured in a storage pool act as global spares. A spare becomes active if a drive in a storage pool fails.
You can select to replicate data from the NAS volumes on the BlackPearl NAS solution to one or more NAS replication targets.
The Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocols provide connectivity to most major operating systems, including Microsoft® Windows®, macOS®, UNIX®, and Linux®. Solid state disk drives may be installed in your system to improve NFS performance.
Metadata Performance Drives increase performance when searching metadata, restoring small files, and in deduplication operations. These drives are dedicated to storing metadata information about all objects on the pool and are useful if you search many files before restoring them.
The Network File Interface (NFI) service allows you to automatically move data from your BlackPearl NAS solution to one or more BlackPearl Nearline gateways, without the need to use a DS3 client. Data is transferred on a schedule and data copied from the BlackPearl NAS solution to the BlackPearl Nearline gateway can be configured to be kept on the BlackPearl NAS solution, or deleted. When a user needs access to data deleted from the BlackPearl NAS solution, the BlackPearl Nearline gateway copies it back to the BlackPearl NAS solution.
Data drives in the BlackPearl NAS provide the solution’s storage capacity. Disk drives are grouped into protected volumes with selectable parity options and automatic data integrity verification to protect against data corruption
The BlackPearl system now allows you to set a threshold for the amount of data in a snapshot that changes before a user is notified. Changes to the size of a snapshot may be caused by a ransomware attack.
Volume Snapshots are images of a volume’s configuration and data makeup as they were when the snapshot was generated. Snapshots are immutable and cannot be overwritten or altered. This protects against any data deletions, encryption, revision, alterations, or appendments. Restoring to triggered or time-based snapshots allow you to go “back in time” and restore the volume to the state it was in when the snapshot was created.
The BlackPearl NAS solution supports even numbers of solid state drives as Write Performance drives. The drives increase write speed to shared NFS volumes on the system.
Data drives in the BlackPearl NAS provide the solution’s storage capacity. Disk drives are grouped into protected volumes with selectable parity options and automatic data integrity verification to protect against data corruption
Expansion nodes can be connected to a master node to increase over capacity of the solution. For Gen1 master nodes, the 44-bay expansion node holds up to 44 disk drives with an active bezel and the 96-bay expansion node holds up to 96 disk drives. For Gen1 and Gen2 master nodes, the 77-bay and 107-bay expansion node holds up to 77 or 107 drives, respectively.