Hypervisors facilitate centralized management by implementing a hyper-converged infrastructure, empowering you to swiftly detect and address any disruptions across all virtual machines. This centralized oversight is instrumental in layering protection over your IT infrastructure, fortifying the resilience of your business against potential threats.

Selecting the right hypervisor is a critical decision that aligns with your company’s specific needs. It’s not just about choosing any software; it’s about finding a hypervisor that resonates with your operational requirements, owned resources, and scalability aspirations. Understanding the significance of virtualization, the next question to ponder is: which hypervisor will be best to help you achieve your business goals? Let’s take a look at the most important aspects you need to take into consideration.

Which Virtualization Solution Is Best for My Company?

Finding the answer can be complicated, as everything depends on your company’s needs and resources. Don’t worry though – we are here to help you identify the most important factors you should consider before the final purchase decision. You can choose from many hypervisors, which let your IT team run different systems and share access to them with respective users. At this stage, it is important to cooperate with the IT team and determine the list of basic requirements:

What Are the Needs of Your Company?

The types of processes that take place within your company will let your IT team create a list of the exact parameters that the chosen virtualization solution should match. Firstly, you should determine, what systems your business needs for successful operations. Then, it is important to point out what types of applications these systems include. As systems are used by people, you should also get to know what specific teams’ / users’ needs are in terms of using those systems. Finally, you should determine what are employees’ needs in terms of storing edited and produced data. Answers to these questions should guide your choice when deciding on a specific hypervisor.

How Much Do Hypervisors Cost?

Hypervisors have 3 main types when it comes to their pricing:

• Free, open-source solutions. These are perfect for IT professionals with extended knowledge and experience, as these solutions will require them to set up most of the features themselves.
• Freemium solutions – meaning that the base product is provided for free, but there are also additional features which can be unlocked with a fee.
• Completely paid solutions. These can be expensive, but at the same time, they come with a complete set of already configured features, along with their updates.

When it comes to general numbers, these can vary a lot, from free solutions to paid ones that reach even tens of thousands of dollars per year. Everything depends on the skill set owned by your company and the specific needs of your organization.

Virtualization Skill Requirements

The price is often connected to the knowledge needed to manage it. Some solutions are relatively easy to use, and intuitive even for less experienced users, while others require extended knowledge and exceptional skills, especially in terms of open-source solutions. This also leads us to another question – what are the current skills of your IT team – will they be able to use the specific hypervisor efficiently? If not – you must also take into consideration their training or even hire a new employee who already has experience working with this specific solution.

As you can see, there are tons of variables that need to be taken into consideration when choosing a hypervisor, and yet there is one more obstacle to overcome.

Technical Support for Different Hypervisors

Open-source support is usually done by a community where everyone helps to fix issues. The good thing is getting many ideas, but remember, this form does not include 24/7 contact and support. In many cases, your team will have to spend some time searching for the right description of a solution that matches the current problem.

Corporate support costs more but gives the guarantee of assistance. They’ll work with your IT team to solve any spotted issues. It is a perfect solution if you want to deal with problems as soon as possible, but as we mentioned – it comes with a cost.

What Are The Benefits Of Hypervisor-Agnosticism?

Finding a hypervisor that fits your company is one thing, but finding a hypervisor that will work fluently with the data storage solution you use – here is where another challenge arises. That is why it is so important to ensure that the software used to manage your company’s data storage is hypervisor-agnostic. This feature grants you high compatibility and thus gives you more flexibility in terms of choosing a hypervisor that most precisely matches your virtualization needs.

Yet, this is not the only advantage of hypervisor-agnosticism. As it grants you freedom in terms of choosing your software foundation for virtualization, it also empowers you to migrate to another hypervisor. The need for changing the hypervisor can be caused by many things, like, for example drastic rise in the product price or a solution being withdrawn from the market.

With hypervisor-agnosticism, you gain technological resilience from the unexpected changes in the virtualization solutions market, and thus, you become more independent from the vendor lock-in. This, in turn, lets you easily implement a new hypervisor to run your VMs. Yet here again, you must keep in mind that different hypervisors have different requirements. This includes both the hardware requirements and human resources with their knowledge and skills to operate different systems. Managing those is a challenge you can easily deal with, thanks to hypervisor-agnosticism, as it opens many possible ways for you to choose from.

A Solution That Matches Any Hypervisor!

Open-E approach is simple – use our software to create a virtualized system tailored to your business needs. The best virtualization solution, in our opinion, is the one that perfectly matches not only your budget but also company resources as a whole – including your IT team’s talent and knowledge. Thus with our data storage software – Open-E JovianDSS – your company can build its systems flexibly and safely while avoiding overpaying for the utilized virtualization solution. Our solution also lets you migrate from one hypervisor to another if needed. Don’t let your systems be limited due to unexpected hypervisor-related changes. Raise your virtualization flexibility, run a resilient business, and benefit from the freedom granted by hypervisor-agnosticism.

The post Hypervisor-agnosticism as a Key to Cost-Efficient Virtualization first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

Did you know the number of people playing video games keeps rising year after year? By 2030, it’s expected to hit a new peak of 2.24 billion users globally – an increase of 15% compared to 2025 and the tenth consecutive year of growth in the games segment of the media market.

The process of game development is one side of the coin, but keeping the game alive, especially considering online genres, like MMO or MOBA, causes another bunch of challenges to deal with.

Let’s discuss the best data storage solutions for the video game industry, their impact on key gaming processes, and their importance to the development process.

Data Storage for Video Games Creation

Video games are created by teams of different sizes, from small studios which work on Indie games, to major companies that create triple-A games. In this article, we will focus on this second group especially, as their work brilliantly exemplifies the crucial role data storage for video game industry plays throughout a game’s entire lifecycle.

Video games are created by people who work long and hard to provide the final product. It takes about 2 to 5 years to create a triple-A game. Let us repeat – 2 to 5 years of constant work performed by multiple teams.

How to Acquire Data Resilience in Data Storage for Video Games Creation

Now imagine that one unfortunate click can make all that work go to trash. Ransomware attacks work just like that. Hackers can encrypt all the data on the system, stopping further work on the game and making it unable to use any files.

You have probably heard about at least a few cyber attacks in the gaming industry, the most known involving CD Projekt RED and Sony. These cases are a great lesson, especially for those who want to provide top-tier products and keep their company’s image untouched.

Fortunately, you can avoid such a scenario with a software solution that lets you roll back to the system status from before the attack. A great example of software that empowers you to do so is Open-E JovianDSS, which additionally lets you create a Retention Plan to generate Snapshots in a set period of time, so you can easily go to the previous version of the data system as you need.

Of course, there are also other threats to data storage for video games, like human errors, which are one of the most common reasons for data loss. With the aforementioned tools you can revert any unwanted changes in your system.

Better Workflow in Data Storage for Video Game Producers

Delivering the game on the declared date is very important, especially for those who offer a pre-order version of the game. When players pay you in advance for something they don’t have yet, it is crucial to ensure that their particular commitment is treated in a serious and respectful way. You should catch every opportunity to increase the user satisfaction in contact with your products, even in the development stage!

Delivering a game by its declared date is paramount, particularly for pre-order versions. When players commit financially in advance, it’s crucial to treat that trust seriously. Every opportunity to boost user satisfaction, even during development, should be seized, and reliable data storage for video games is fundamental to achieving this.

To create the final game, you must also ensure that different teams effectively work together and push forward the fruit of their work. They should always be ready to check and correct any bugs and shortcomings to ultimately provide players with a top-quality product. To achieve that, creators must have constant and stable access to the latest version of data.

To ensure that stored and processed data remains consistent and available for employees to keep projects moving forward, consider the following strategies:

• Self-healing, which automatically detects and corrects data inconsistencies on frequently accessed blocks, providing protection at the “cellular” level.
• Scrubbing, which verifies and repairs inconsistencies in less frequently accessed data by periodically scanning and checking data integrity.
• RAID configuration, which creates redundant copies of data across multiple disks to prevent data loss in case of disk failure.
• Cluster mirroring, which maintains a mirrored copy of the data on a second node in a cluster, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.

Data Storage for Video Games Maintenance & Expansion

By using the aforementioned tools, you create a safe and robust base for all the work that needs to be done to provide a high-quality data storage for video game to the users. When the game is distributed to wide audiences, it is time for another step, which is maybe even more important.

Using High-Availability Data Storage for Video Games User Satisfaction

Even after executing a huge number of tests, on the premiere day, players often spot a lot of bugs. That’s why when a new game is released, it is very probable that the company will soon release a “Day One Patch” to fix all the major problems. Constant access to coherent data is a must have to quickly respond to the reported cases and fix any bugs.

High-availability data storage for video games is especially useful for games which are intended to grow in content over time. It is very probable that adding new elements to the game will affect the overall in-game experience, sometimes for the worse (for example by adding characters, items, or enemies that are overpowered, often called just broken). That’s why you always need to keep an eye on the user feedback and respond to community preferences.

The Role of Software-defined Data Storage for MMO and MOBA Games

When the team has already dealt with the major bugs, they need to take care of the current user experience in the game. A new challenge arises here, especially in the MMO and MOBA genres. They are strongly based on user accounts that contain data on players’ progress, unlocked and purchased items and extensions, their position in global rankings, reports about their behavior in the game and other important information. Every account holds its own data, and, especially in terms of rankings, it needs to be very precise and updated for a coherent experience for the whole game community.

Of course, all of this data needs to be stored somewhere. Considering the fact that an online game (especially right after release) will be getting more and more users ready to sign up, a scalable data storage that lets you flexibly extend the available space for data is a must have. This lets you avoid scenarios in which players can’t log in, because the servers are overloaded by other players. What can help here is creating a software-defined data storage system that gives you a lot of flexibility for choosing the hardware you can utilize to create the system and extend its space capacity. A good base for such a solution is Open-E JovianDSS, which was already used in over 41,000 implementations all around the world.

Level Up Your Data Storage!

Company growth means additional data storage needs. The gaming industry is especially demanding in these terms. If your company wants to develop multiple games and provide the best experience to all the players, you need to prepare for a lot of data to store and protect. No need to worry though, at Open-E we develop our software to ensure that your game creation processes go smoothly and without problems thanks to data storage solutions that support your creative work on a daily basis!

If you think about taking your data storage to the next level, feel free to try out our software – Open-E JovianDSS – with a 60-day Trial Version – and if you would like to unlock the full version, be sure to contact our sales team! We can help your company to get more achievements in the gaming industry and our specialists are ready to guide you and help you prepare to deal with any threat that can stand in your way.

The post Data Storage Solutions for Gaming Industry first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

Key Insights

1. The Linux Hardened Repository (LHR) is a dedicated server strategy that renders backup data immutable to serve as a secure last line of defense against ransomware.
2. Immutability is technically achieved by applying the Linux immutable attribute (chattr +i) on the XFS file system, which prevents data deletion even by the root user.
3. Rigorous hardening requires deploying the LHR with single-use, non-root credentials and then disabling SSH to minimize the server’s attack surface.
4. The XFS file system offers performance benefits by enabling near-instant, space-efficient synthetic full backups using reflink technology.
5. For optimal cyber resilience, combining LHR/XFS with a ZFS-based storage platform creates an architecturally independent, double-layer of immutable defense.

The Linux Hardened Repository (LHR) represents a foundational pillar in modern cyber resilience strategy, moving beyond traditional backup data storage to provide a defense-in-depth architecture against advanced threats, most notably ransomware. Simply put, the LHR is a designated Linux server configured with specific file system attributes and security protocols that render backup data immutable (unchangeable and undeletable) for a predetermined retention period.

This architectural shift is a direct response to the escalating sophistication of cyberattacks. Ransomware actors no longer target only primary production data. They specifically aim and seek to destroy or encrypt backup repositories to block recovery options and force organizations into paying the ransom. The Linux Hardened Repository provides the critical layer of protection required to ensure that the “last line of defense” remains intact and reliable.

The Cost of Compromised Backups

The financial impact of modern data breaches and ransomware attacks has made immutability a mandatory component of risk management, not merely an optional IT feature. Cybersecurity statistics from the past few years underscore the overwhelming need for dependable recovery capabilities.

Ransomware Statistics are Still Breathtaking

• Average Cost of a Data Breach: $5.08 million (according to IBM’s “Cost of Data Breach Report 2025”).
• Total Ransom Extorted: Attackers extorted a staggering $813 million in 2024, a significant increase from the previous year (Statista.com).
• Average Downtime: The average downtime following a ransomware attack is 21 days, although it can be longer for certain sectors, such as government institutions, which may experience downtime that lasts almost a month.

Why Standard Backups Fail

Standard backup repositories typically rely on shared administrative access and conventional file systems, leaving them vulnerable to encryption or deletion if a hacker gains elevated network privileges. Once an attacker is inside the network, they often seek to disable or wipe out the restore points, rendering the victim defenseless.

The operational conclusion derived from these trends is clear: organizations must implement an architectural solution that places the backup data beyond the operational reach of the production environment’s compromised credentials. The Linux Hardened Repository, therefore, serves as a specialized vault designed to withstand highly targeted attacks aimed at the recovery media itself.

What is Linux Hardened Repository, and How Does it Provide Immutability?

The core concept of the Linux Hardened Repository is to provide an immutable backup, using a dedicated, securely configured Linux server. An immutable backup is defined as a copy that cannot be modified, deleted, or encrypted for a specified period of time.

The objective of an LHR is to introduce a “virtual air gap” into the backup chain. This protection ensures that data residing on the repository is shielded from any threats originating from the network, including malicious encryption or administrative deletion. While the physical separation of an air gap solution is definitive, the LHR achieves near-total separation virtually by decoupling the backup data retention from the administrative credentials used in the primary environment. By protecting data from network threats and compromised privileges, the organization gains the complete confidence required for radical resilience and rapid recovery.

Linux Hardened Repository and XFS Fundamentals

The efficacy of the Linux Hardened Repository relies entirely on specific native security and efficiency features found within the Linux operating system and its chosen file system.

XFS, Reflinks, and the Immutable Attribute

The standard choice for a Hardened Repository is XFS. This selection is critical because Linux provides the native file system capabilities necessary to enforce immutability that Windows-based systems lack. For example, while Windows’ ReFS supports block cloning (a performance enhancement), it does not natively support the immutability attribute required for this specific hardening technique, making Linux an essential component of the architecture.

Immutable Attribute

The fundamental security mechanism is the Linux file immutable attribute. Once this attribute is applied to a backup file, the operating system kernel prevents any modification or deletion of that file, even by the root user, for the duration of the immutability period. This attribute is independent of the network privileges used for the backup transfer, ensuring the data blocks are locked down against tampering.

Performance via Fast Clone (Reflinks)

Beyond security, the selection of XFS delivers critical performance advantages for efficient backup management. XFS supports a technology known as reflink (or Veeam Fast Clone). Instead of physically copying large amounts of data to create a new full restore point, Fast Clone utilizes metadata operations. New backup blocks point to existing, unchanged data blocks, resulting in near-instantaneous, space-efficient creation of new full restore points. This efficiency drastically improves Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) without incurring massive storage overhead or lengthy processing windows.

Linux Hardened Repository Implementation & Security Best Practices

For a Linux Hardened Repository to provide enterprise-grade protection, basic configuration is insufficient. The underlying Linux server must be rigorously hardened following industry standards, eliminating common attack surfaces and adhering to the principle of least privilege.

Single-Use Credentials and SSH Management

The deployment methodology for an LHR is designed to minimize the window of opportunity for attackers to gain privileged access to the backup server.

Principle of Least Privilege

The system must be configured using single-use, non-root credentials for the initial setup. This account is necessary only for the deployment of the Data Mover (transport service) onto the repository server.

SSH Disablement

Secure Shell (SSH) access, while required temporarily for deployment, represents a significant attack vector. For security purposes, once the Data Mover is deployed and communicating via the secured transport service, the administrative advice is to disable SSH connectivity for the single-use account or, ideally, for the server itself if management can be performed locally or via console access. Hardening measures should also include disabling root login and enforcing strong passwords or key-based authentication for any remaining SSH access.

The New Level of Immutability: Double-Layer Defense

While a properly configured Hardened Repository offers robust single-layer protection, modern threats demand a defense-in-depth approach. Integrating an LHR with a ZFS-based data storage platform, such as Open-E JovianVHR, creates an exceptionally resilient, double-layered, immutable architecture.

Combining Linux Hardened Repository, XFS, and ZFS for True Immutability

The strategic combination of LHR, XFS, and ZFS delivers both high performance and architectural separation, maximizing resilience against catastrophic compromise.

Layer 1: Application-Aware Immutability (Linux Hardened Repository and XFS)

The initial layer utilizes the Linux Hardened Repository and the XFS immutable attribute. This layer is crucial for optimizing backup operations through Veeam Fast Clone/reflinks, ensuring fast and efficient synthetic full backups.

Layer 2: Architectural Independence (ZFS CoW Snapshots)

The second, independent layer is derived from ZFS’s native Copy-on-Write (CoW) snapshot architecture, which is the foundation of the Open-E JovianVHR platform. ZFS snapshots are inherently immutable. When a snapshot is created, the original data blocks are not overwritten; any new writes are directed to new storage locations, preserving the point-in-time copy.

The fundamental advantage of this second layer is architectural separation. The ZFS snapshot policy is managed by the underlying storage operating system (Open-E JovianVHR), completely independent of the Linux Hardened Repository’s host operating system and the backup application (Veeam) credentials. Should a sophisticated ransomware attack compromise the LHR host and somehow bypass the XFS immutable attribute, the ZFS snapshots remain isolated, verifiable, and untouched, providing an unassailable point of recovery.

Open-E JovianVHR: Enhanced Immutability, Performance, and Data Integrity

The ZFS foundation provides additional benefits crucial for enterprise data protection:

1. Data Integrity
   ZFS utilizes end-to-end checksums, atomic transactions, and self-healing capabilities. These features ensure reliability by detecting silent data corruption (bit rot) and automatically correcting it using redundancy built into the data storage pool.
   
   
2. Data Redundancy
   Data can be protected by up to triple-parity arrays.
   
   
3. Efficiency
   Open-E JovianVHR leverages ZFS capabilities such as powerful inline data deduplication and compression at the block level. This dramatically reduces the physical storage required for long-term immutable retention, optimizing cost efficiency for organizations implementing strict 3-2-1 backup strategies.
   
   
4. Performance
   ZFS built-in features, such as caching mechanisms like the read cache and write log, along with ZFS special devices and metadata pinning, can greatly boost the performance of affordable, off-the-shelf hardware often used for backup systems.
   
   

ZFS built-in features, such as caching mechanisms like the read cache and write log, along with ZFS special devices and metadata pinning, can greatly boost the performance of affordable, off-the-shelf hardware often used for backup systems.

To learn more about Open-E JovianHVR, check the data sheet.

The post How Linux Hardened Repository Makes Backup Better first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

Don’t worry though! We will guide you safely through the dense server jungle!

Data Storage Predators: Identify The Enemy!

There are many predators just waiting to harm your data (or eat it alive!). Threats come in many forms, from data integrity breaches, through hardware failures to employee misconduct and natural disasters. The effects of all these damaging scenarios can be overcome by ensuring data security through the implementation of 7 data protection features, which we will now examine. Let’s take a look at them!

1. Self-healing and Scrubbing

Let’s start from the very basic level. How to avoid your data consistency being interrupted by silent data corruption? The ZFS system has a solution for that, and it is known as self-healing of data. This feature means that the system checks the integrity of data when it is read out, and if any error is spotted, the system corrects it so your data can be healthy and ready to use again! There is also an option to run a check of the data integrity manually through the scrubbing process. You should keep it in mind and use it frequently, as the data that is not accessed for a long time won’t be protected by self-healing, which works only while reading data.

2. Snapshots and Retention Plans

The same way you take some pictures to post on your social media, ZFS can take a picture of your data system in a particular moment in time to gain the ability of recreating it. These “images” called snapshots are read-only files that store information about the state of the data system at a particular moment in time and allow you to revert to a previous version if any unwanted changes have occurred. It is a strong tool, especially against ransomware attacks, as the hackers can encrypt your data, but they have no power to encrypt a read-only file – that’s what snapshots exactly are.

Moreover, you can create retention plans based on the frequency of taking the snapshots and the time they should be kept. It is important to use this feature wisely, as you don’t want to plug up your system with an excessive number of snapshots you don’t really need. Always calculate it precisely to your needs!

3. RAIDs and Redundant Copies of Your Data

Do you know that the average drive failure rate is 100%? They all are physically limited and, at some point, must meet their end. This also refers to the data that is kept on it: if the drive dies, the data held on it is gone as well. If only there was a way not to lose this data… in fact there is a solution!

You can use several disks to create a RAID or mirror copies. This way, the system will create redundant copies of your data and redistribute them among configured disks, so in case of single or even multiple disks failure, there is still an option to recreate lost data from/using the redundant copies that are still kept on the well-performing disks!

As in the case of snapshot retention plans, here you must also make some decisions, especially considering how many disks you would like to reserve for redundant copies and what level of protection you need this feature to provide.

4. High-Availability of Data

Nobody wants any disk to fail, but it happens. So what if a whole data storage system fails? Well, you can always have an additional system that will hold redundant data copied from the original one.

To protect your data storage on a higher level, you can create a high-availability cluster. It consists of two redundant servers called nodes that work together in one system to ensure that if one appliance goes off, the second one can automatically take over its actions.

This kind of setup ensures your Business Continuity as you keep an uninterrupted access to data, even if a disturbing event with your node occurs, letting your business operations to be always in motion for better workflow.

5. On-Site Backup Server

If you have been reading with attention, you can probably guess what I’m going to state right now. Yes – your high-availability cluster is also threatened. For example, when one of your employees is temporarily very distracted. Chances are that someone will accidentally and permanently delete some important data from your system. Or your appliance might be simply threatened by a hot coffee spilled by a data storage specialist. We are sure you don’t hire clumsy people, but accidents happen, and everyone has some worse days. That’s why you need another assurance that you won’t lose your data for good. This one is pretty simple – you can create an additional backup server at your place of work for easy access to your backed-up data in case anything goes wrong with your high-availability cluster.

6. Off-Site Backup Server

Do you remember what we stated about the local data storage solutions? Natural disasters and human destructive drives are still out there, and they still look forward to destroying your data storage appliances. That’s why it is good to have one extra appliance in the form of an off-site backup server located in a totally different place. This is the final line of defense that can save you from losing your data for good.

7. Maximum Data Security

Finally, we come to the most effective way of protecting data storage. It is so powerful because… it basically consists of every form of data protection we mentioned before. By combining High Availability with On- & Off-site Data Protection, you provide your data storage with a Maximum Data Security that ensures your data safety on many levels. We can say that it creates strategic armor that will protect your data from any harm.

Cover Your Data With Layers of Protection

Again, losing data = losing money. If you really care about your company’s business growth, it is worth remembering how important it is to protect your data from any disruptive events and to implement disaster recovery measures. If you would like to read more about how disruptive results of losing data can be, make sure to check our Beyond Backup brochure in which we dive into more statistics and technical details you can use to understand this topic even better and get some inspiration on implementing better data protection in your own data storage system. We hope that your data storage will always be in top form, ready to cope with any struggles and attacks coming in different forms!

The post 7 Best Open-E Software Features to Secure Your Data Storage first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

Hardware-agnosticism – Open-E’s Remedy for Vendor Lock-In

Hardware agnosticism is a feature of certain software solutions compatible with many different hardware components without being tied to a strongly limited set of configuration options. With the hardware-agnostic nature of software, you can achieve greater flexibility in terms of composing your data storage infrastructure. What’s more, this flexibility also enhances your data storage protection capabilities, as, in case of hardware failure, you replace it with a plethora of different hardware components. No need to be limited to a pre-defined set of hardware. More options to choose from also mean a higher overall availability of the parts that you can use.

This way, hardware agnosticism makes you also more independent of the hardware vendors and providers, which gives you more freedom in terms of choosing your preferred hardware components and further lets you achieve the best price-per-component ratio.

The Benefits of a Hardware-Agnostic Data Storage Solution

Hardware agnosticism comes with many advantages, both in terms of your current daily operations and in terms of long-time data storage architecture planning. Let’s take a look at the major features of hardware agnosticism that make it a game changer for data storage solutions:

• Flexibility and Compatibility: Hardware-agnostic software is designed to function seamlessly with a diverse array of data storage devices, regardless of brand or model, offering adaptability and ensuring consistent compatibility across different systems.
• Cost Efficiency: Being hardware agnostic, the software enables organizations to eliminate the need for specialized hardware investments, thereby lowering costs.
• Future-Proofing: Hardware-agnostic solutions are more resilient to becoming outdated with the introduction of new technologies, helping to keep the data storage infrastructure relevant and functional for a longer period.
• Scalability: It facilitates seamless scalability as businesses expand, enabling the software to handle and implement additional storage devices without concern about the hardware type.
• Vendor Independence: Organizations are free from being tied to a single vendor’s ecosystem, allowing them to select or switch hardware vendors without affecting the software’s performance.
• Simplified Management: A hardware-agnostic approach streamlines management by offering a single, unified interface and uniform features across all data storage systems, regardless of the hardware used.
• Disaster Recovery and Redundancy: Hardware-agnostic software can accommodate a variety of storage environments, enhancing disaster recovery and redundancy strategies by enabling data to be backed up across multiple types of data storage hardware.

How Open-E Utilizes Hardware-agnosticism in Data Storage Solution Development

At Open-E, we are dedicated to providing cutting-edge data storage solutions that prioritize both performance and reliability. We work closely with esteemed technology partners such as Toshiba, AIC, and ATTO, who supply us with a range of hardware components. These parts undergo thorough testing in our QA lab to ensure they meet our rigorous quality and compatibility standards. This collaboration allows our Open-E JovianDSS software to support various configurations and an extensive selection of hardware components.

For those looking to verify whether their planned hardware is supported by the specific version of Open-E JovianDSS, we offer a comprehensive Hardware Compatibility List, which includes all hardware components for which our software has available drivers. This ensures that users can check compatibility before making decisions.

In addition, our Certified Hardware Components page offers a curated list of hardware components tested in real data storage environments and checked to match specific technological and business purposes. This way, the Open-E QA team ensured that this specific hardware could match the most challenging scenarios and ensure seamless performance with Open-E products.

Moreover, our Certified Servers page showcases servers that have been rigorously tested, benchmarked, and certified in Open-E labs. This way, with our partners, we ensure that the specific needs of companies from different industries are matched. In turn, you can enjoy the performance and advanced data safety levels of the ready-to-use solutions tailored to specific business needs.

Test Open-E JovianDSS with Your Data Storage Hardware

As you can see, making your data storage infrastructure hardware-agnostic is a game changer for modern days when constant changes in the market and a relentless stream of new technology solutions change our reality basically every day. Adapt and become a part of this technological evolution by downloading our completely free 60-day trial of Open-E JovianDSS. With the power that lies in our software, prepare your data storage infrastructure for new data storage challenges that come with modern technological opportunities and threats.

The post How Hardware-Agnostic Solutions Make Data Storage Better in 2026 first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

The Real Cost of Outsourced Data Storage Infrastructure

For years, enterprise IT strategies rushed toward public cloud adoption. However, experienced systems architects are now taking a more balanced approach. The initial promise of hands-free infrastructure management has often led to unpredictable monthly billing, vendor lock-in, and a significant loss of operational control. This realization has driven a growing movement toward cloud repatriation, with organizations bringing core workloads back to architectures they can directly manage.

Today’s data storage administrators must balance two main priorities: maintaining complete control over their data and managing a highly volatile hardware procurement market. Component shortages and sudden price fluctuations mean we can no longer solve capacity issues by simply purchasing more hardware. Navigating this environment requires software-defined flexibility, balancing public cloud scalability with the reliable performance and predictable ownership of an on-premises architecture.

Comparing On-Premises, Cloud, and Hybrid Data Storage Approaches

To build a resilient data storage system, you need to match specific application workloads with the deployment model that offers the best balance of performance and control. The table below outlines how these architectures handle key infrastructure demands:

Based on these distinct features of different approaches to storing data, we can sum up their main pros and cons:

On-Premises Storage

• Pros: Direct control over data storage system configuration, ultra-low local latency, and complete ownership of system security.
• Cons: Requires upfront capital investment and ongoing hardware lifecycle management.

Public Cloud Storage

• Pros: Fast provisioning, high flexibility for temporary projects, and no local physical footprints to maintain.
• Cons: High long-term costs, potentially expensive data retrieval fees, and reliance on a single vendor’s platform.

Hybrid Data Storage

• Pros: Optimized infrastructure that runs high-throughput workloads on predictable local systems while utilizing the cloud for backup, long-term archives, or temporary compute bursts.
• Cons: Requires advanced integration expertise and clear management strategies to avoid operational silos.

Taking Full Control Over The Data You Store

Evaluating these choices shows that modern data storage design focuses on two main areas: redefining data sovereignty as absolute control and using software intelligence to manage hardware shortages.

Data Sovereignty

For systems administrators, data sovereignty represents a fundamental duty: taking direct responsibility for an organization’s data, ensuring its safety and constant access.

When you move core data pools to a public cloud, you lose direct oversight of the underlying storage hardware, its configuration, the level of data protection setup, the exact distribution of data blocks, and the real-time access logs. If a cloud vendor suffers a major outage, changes its pricing terms, or modifies its infrastructure, your team is left with few options.

True data sovereignty means maintaining complete visibility and control over your data storage environment. Deploying an on-premises or private enterprise cloud layer with data storage software like Open-E JovianDSS provides this operational independence. You control the data replication, encryption keys, and hardware configurations, keeping your core infrastructure stable and independent of third-party platforms.

Overcoming Hardware Shortages with Software-Defined Storage

The current hardware market presents significant challenges for infrastructure planning. Increased demand for high-performance computing has led to longer delivery timelines and higher costs for enterprise drives and components. Buying extra physical storage in advance to prepare for future growth is no longer a cost-effective option.

To keep projects moving forward without overextending budgets, administrators can use the built-in storage efficiency features of Open-E JovianDSS:

1. Hardware Agnosticism: Open-E JovianDSS decouples software services from the underlying physical layer, allowing you to build reliable architecture using commodity servers & components. You can mix and match available JBODs and reuse existing storage assets to maximize the value of your current hardware.
2. Thin Provisioning and Strategic Overprovisioning: You don’t need to purchase new drives at inflated prices. By using thin provisioning, you can present virtual storage space sizes to your applications while only utilizing the physical disks needed for current workloads. This, in turn, allows you to delay physical disk upgrades until supply lines normalize and component pricing stabilizes.
3. Advanced ZFS Cache & Tiering Optimization: Maximizes IOPS and system responsiveness on hybrid configurations by combining RAM-based ARC, SSD-backed L2ARC, and dedicated Write Logs (ZIL/SLOG). It leverages ZFS Special Data Allocation Classes in the form of ZFS Special Devices, permanently offloading critical metadata and small file blocks onto fast storage components to accelerate file indexing and access. This performance enhancement can be further paired with NVMe partitioning feature, which makes the whole solution even more cost-effective, as it allows a single high-speed NVMe drive to be split into separate dedicated partitions for caching, logging, and these special data classes, drastically minimizing hardware overhead. 

Secure and Optimize Your Data Storage Infrastructure

Do not leave your critical data assets dependent on third-party cloud architectures or restrictive hardware vendor cycles. True operational reliability requires an independent strategy that prioritizes data control and uses software intelligence to optimize physical resources.

Take complete control of your storage infrastructure and mitigate system risks:

1. Review your current data for high-throughput operations, diverse from temporary secondary workloads.
2. Reuse your existing hardware assets or choose flexible commodity servers to avoid single-vendor lock-in.
3. Deploy Open-E JovianDSS to build a high-availability, hardware-agnostic storage solution tailored to your exact performance and data ownership needs.

Download the fully functional 60-day trial version of Open-E JovianDSS to see how you can design a resilient, cost-effective storage ecosystem.

The post On-Premises vs. Cloud: Choosing a Better Data Storage Solution first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

• Buy only the hardware you need now by using intelligent provisioning to allocate virtual space and add physical disks later when prices drop.

• Expand capacity without downtime by adding new drives to your existing data storage pools instantly as your business grows.

• Save on expensive RAM by using faster, more affordable NVMe drives as a performance cache to offset high memory costs.

• Pay only for what you use with a flexible licensing model that lets you increase your data storage software capacity incrementally as you add hardware.

The hardware market shifts and RAM price spikes generated unprecedented challenges for IT professionals and businesses alike. The geopolitical storm that led to a complete change in market conditions made the traditional approach to data storage infrastructure planning increasingly difficult and costly. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for making smart investment decisions that protect both your budget, your system’s scalability, and your business continuity.

Addressing the RAM Price Spike & Overall Hardware Price Increase

DRAM prices have surged dramatically, with year-over-year increases reaching as high as 172% according to industry reports. TrendForce data indicates that conventional DRAM prices rose by 18-23% in Q4 2025 alone, with forecasts suggesting this upward trend will continue well into 2026. Memory module manufacturers like Samsung and SK Hynix are operating at capacity, yet can only fulfill approximately 70% of orders due to overwhelming demand from AI and data center expansion.

The situation is equally challenging in the HDD market. Enterprise hard drives now face lead times stretching from 3 to 6 months, with some high-capacity models (32TB and above) requiring wait times exceeding one year. Contract HDD prices have risen by 4% quarter-over-quarter (the highest increase in eight quarters), driven primarily by massive data center buildouts and AI infrastructure demands.

The situation is equally challenging in the HDD market. Enterprise hard drives now face lead times stretching from 3 to 6 months, with some high-capacity models (32TB and above) requiring wait times exceeding one year. Contract HDD prices have risen by 4% quarter-over-quarter (the highest increase in eight quarters), driven primarily by massive data center buildouts and AI infrastructure demands.

Silicon Motion’s CEO Wallace Kou summarized the situation starkly: “We’re facing [what has] never happened before, the HDD, DRAM, (…) NAND, all in severe shortage in 2026. Most of our capacity [is] sold out.” For businesses planning data storage infrastructure, this creates a fundamental question: How can you build a reliable, high-performance system without overcommitting to expensive hardware that may not be available when you need it?

Reusing Old Hardware and Gradual Growth

When you start following the “start small, scale big” infrastructure strategy, you initially extract maximum value from what you already own. A primary challenge for modern IT environments is navigating system upgrades and migrations without letting already owned, functional hardware assets go to waste.

A prime opportunity for cost optimization presents itself when migrating from legacy data storage solutions to modern ones. For instance, organizations transitioning from legacy setups can strategically repurpose their existing older hardware servers and their components rather than getting rid of them (which also generates additional work). Instead of leaving behind older storage nodes that have reached their performance or primary capacity limits, best practices dictate repurposing them as dedicated backup targets or secondary replication repositories.

Repurposed Hardware Case Study

This exact strategy aligns with real-world enterprise upgrades, such as the infrastructure modernization executed by OPTIMA Packaging Group GmbH. Managing a globally stretched, virtualized production infrastructure, Optima’s IT administration transitioned from legacy Open-E DSS V7 architectures to Open-E JovianDSS to overcome capacity constraints while dramatically enhancing system reliability, flexibility, and operational resilience. By utilizing Open-E JovianDSS’s built-in On- & Off-site Data Protection feature, legacy hardware assets could be successfully repositioned in the off-site disaster recovery nodes. This configuration enabled space-efficient data protection through unlimited snapshots and asynchronous replication without any unnecessary immediate purchases of pricey new hardware components.

Gradual Expansion with High-Value Connectivity Components

When existing systems must scale to meet expanding workloads, a full hardware replacement is rarely the most economical path. Instead, a gradual expansion utilizing key modular components delivers the best price-outcome ratio, minimizing capital expenditure while unlocking massive bottlenecks.

To bridge the gap between legacy hardware and modern high-speed infrastructure, targeted connectivity solutions provide a significant strategic edge. As highlighted during the NAB Show 2026, ATTO Technology offers specialized hardware engineered specifically for this type of gradual infrastructure optimization. Most notably, ATTO XstreamCORE® Ethernet Intelligent Bridges allow organizations to connect existing SAS storage architectures and share them seamlessly across modern Ethernet networks. This effectively moves archive and backup access onto an IP-native fabric, extending the operational lifecycle of older JBOD enclosures and maximizing previous equipment investments without requiring full storage overhauls.

Furthermore, instead of replacing entire server nodes to boost data throughput, IT administrators can incrementally deploy targeted components like ATTO ExpressSAS® HBAs for high-performance direct-attach SAS expansion fabrics, or ATTO FastFrame AIR NICs to optimize network interfaces where sustained thermal headroom and rock-solid reliability are essential.

Combined with a hardware-agnostic architecture of software solutions like Open-E JovianDSS, these targeted connectivity upgrades give organizations the operational flexibility to defer major upgrades. In turn, they are also able to overcome unstable hardware pricing and achieve optimized performance scaling. The capacity can also be extended incrementally as actual business demands dictate.

So, as we already know what to do with our hardware in these tough times, it is time to think about the distinct features of the software solution that stores your data. What is the smartest digital approach to data storage?

Benefits of Software-Defined Storage Scalability: Start Small, Scale Big

The answer lies in adopting a flexible, software-defined storage strategy that allows you to start with what you have and scale as your needs and market conditions evolve. Open-E JovianDSS exemplifies this approach, offering enterprise-grade ZFS-based data storage software that separates your system capabilities from the constraints of specific hardware configurations.

Valued at $62.98 billion in 2025, the global software-defined storage (SDS) market is poised for explosive growth. It is projected to climb from $80.55 billion in 2026 to nearly $684.35 billion by 2035, maintaining a robust CAGR of 26.94% throughout the forecast period. This tendency reflects organizations’ increasing recognition that flexible, hardware-agnostic storage solutions provide the adaptability required, especially in uncertain times.

Start with What You Have: Intelligent Provisioning

One of the most powerful capabilities for managing data storage in a resource-constrained environment is intelligent provisioning. Open-E JovianDSS provides two most suitable approaches that allow you to optimize your existing hardware:

Thin Provisioning

Allocate data storage resources on-demand rather than pre-allocating entire volumes. This means you can present larger logical volumes to applications while only consuming physical space as data is actually written. For environments where data growth is unpredictable, thin provisioning can dramatically extend the useful life of your existing hardware.

Overprovisioning

In scenarios where you need to commit capacity to applications but want to manage actual hardware purchases over time, overprovisioning allows you to allocate more logical data storage space than physically exists. Combined with monitoring and alerting, this approach lets you defer hardware purchases until prices stabilize or supply improves, without limiting your application deployment timeline.

Practical Example

A growing business needs 100TB of storage capacity for their virtualization environment, but current HDD prices and availability make immediate full deployment impractical. Using overprovisioning, they can deploy with 60TB of physical storage while presenting 100TB to their VMware or Proxmox environment. As prices normalize or supply improves, they add physical capacity without any reconfiguration of their virtual infrastructure.

Grow Without Disruption – Instant Expansion with Open-E JovianDSS

Perhaps the most critical capability for a “start small, scale big” strategy is the ability to expand data storage capacity without downtime. Open-E JovianDSS’s Instant Pool Expansion feature enables seamless integration of new disks into existing storage pools during normal operations.

This capability transforms how you approach data storage architecture planning. Instead of sizing for peak projected capacity years in advance and paying today’s inflated prices for tomorrow’s needs, you can implement a staged deployment strategy. Purchase what you need now, monitor utilization, and add capacity incrementally as both your requirements and market conditions evolve.

The technical implementation leverages ZFS’s advanced pooled storage model, which allows vdevs (virtual devices) to be added to an existing pool without data migration or service interruption. Applications continue accessing data normally while the pool automatically incorporates new capacity and rebalances as needed.

Flexible Licensing That Grows with Your Data Storage Capacity

The “start small, scale big” approach extends beyond hardware to the software licensing model itself. Open-E JovianDSS offers data storage Extension Licenses that allow you to increase your licensed storage capacity incrementally, matching your software investment to your actual deployment size.

How Open-E Data Storage Software Licensing Model Works:

This licensing flexibility means you don’t need to purchase capacity you won’t use for years. Instead, you can:

• Start with a base license that matches your initial hardware deployment.
• Purchase storage extensions as you add physical capacity to your system.
• Stack multiple extensions – additional storage licenses sum up and add to the total licensed capacity.
• Activate extensions instantly – no reinstallation or reconfiguration required, your system continues running.

This approach aligns your software costs with your actual infrastructure growth, preserving capital for hardware purchases when market conditions are favorable. Combined with the technical scalability features, it creates a complete “pay as you grow” data storage solution that makes financial sense in today’s volatile market.

Smart Architecture Expansion: From Single Node to High Availability Cluster

Budget constraints often force difficult choices between performance, capacity, and reliability. With Open-E JovianDSS, you don’t have to sacrifice long-term reliability for short-term affordability. The software supports a natural evolution from single-node deployments to full high-availability clusters.

1) Start with a Single Node

Begin with a single server running Open-E JovianDSS. This provides enterprise-grade ZFS features, including data checksumming, compression, deduplication, snapshots, and replication, all on standard, commodity hardware. Your initial investment remains protected because the same software license and configuration will scale with you.

2) Add a Second Node When Ready

When business requirements demand higher availability, or when hardware budgets allow, simply add a second server node. Open-E JovianDSS supports multiple HA cluster configurations:

• Shared Storage Clusters: Two nodes connected to shared JBODs via SAS, Fibre Channel, or NVMe-oF.
• Non-Shared (Metro) Clusters over Ethernet: Each node has its own storage, synchronized over the network = ideal for cost-effective SATA deployments and georedundancy.
• Cluster-in-a-Box: Two servers with shared drives in a single enclosure for maximum density.

Both Active-Active (load-balanced) and Active-Passive configurations are supported, with automatic failover for iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, Fibre Channel, and NVMe-oF protocols. The transition from single-node to clustered operation can be planned and executed without replacing your initial investment.

Optimize RAM Data Storage Investment with Tiered Caching Architecture

With unprecedented RAM prices reaching historic highs, every gigabyte counts. ZFS-based storage traditionally relies heavily on RAM for its Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), and more RAM generally means better performance. However, Open-E JovianDSS’s tiered caching architecture provides flexibility to achieve excellent performance even with more modest RAM configurations.

How the Caching Hierarchy Works

• ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache): First-level cache in system RAM, providing sub-microsecond access to frequently used data.
• L2ARC (Level 2 ARC): Second-level read cache on NVMe or SSD devices, extending cache capacity beyond RAM limits.
• ZIL/SLOG (ZFS Intent Log): Write log on fast NVMe for accelerated synchronous write performance.
• ZFS Special Devices: Dedicated fast storage for metadata and small files, further reducing RAM pressure.

NVMe Advantages in Practical Data Storage Approach

When deploying NVMe-based data storage or using NVMe as cache devices, RAM requirements become significantly more flexible. Here’s why: NVMe devices can serve as both L2ARC (read cache) and SLOG (write acceleration), handling workloads that would otherwise demand massive RAM investments.

Modern OpenZFS implementations have also substantially improved L2ARC efficiency. The metadata overhead per cached block has been reduced (approximately 70-96 bytes per record in current versions), making L2ARC more practical even on systems with moderate RAM. The persistent L2ARC feature means cache contents survive reboots, eliminating the cold-cache performance penalty that historically made L2ARC less attractive.

Practical Guidance: Start with the RAM you can afford and deploy NVMe cache devices for your performance-critical pools. Monitor your ARC hit rates and L2ARC effectiveness. You can always add RAM later as prices stabilize, and your cache devices will continue providing value even after RAM expansion.

Additional Data Storage Cost-Optimization Features

Beyond the core scalability features, Open-E JovianDSS includes several capabilities that help maximize the value of your hardware investment:

• Inline Compression (LZ4): Reduces physical storage consumption by up to 2-3x for typical workloads (depending on data), effectively multiplying your capacity without additional drives
• Unlimited Snapshots and Clones: Space-efficient data protection without consuming additional storage proportional to protected data
• Off-site Data Protection: Built-in asynchronous replication for disaster recovery without additional software licensing
• Hardware Agnostic Design: Run on commodity x86 servers, avoiding vendor lock-in and enabling best-value hardware procurement

Conclusion: Strategic Flexibility in Uncertain Times

The current data storage market presents real challenges, but it doesn’t have to paralyze your infrastructure planning. By adopting a “start small, scale big” approach with software-defined storage like Open-E JovianDSS, you can:

• Deploy with confidence using current hardware availability.
• Defer major hardware purchases until market conditions improve.
• Scale capacity and performance incrementally without disruption.
• Match software licensing costs to actual deployment size with storage extensions.
• Evolve from single-node to high-availability architecture as requirements demand.
• Optimize expensive RAM through intelligent NVMe caching strategies.

The key insight is that your data storage architecture should be a strategic asset, not a constraint. In a world where hardware prices and availability are volatile, the software layer becomes your point of stability and control. Choose a solution that grows with you, and you’ll navigate today’s challenges while building infrastructure that serves you well into the future.

The post How to Overcome Hardware Price Spikes? Start Small, Scale Big! first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

Let’s be honest, true IT experts don’t build systems to meet minimum requirements – we build them to withstand the worst-case scenario while delivering peak performance. When it comes to the data storage backend for your virtualized environment, SAN solutions offer major advantages that we should look into more deeply.

Virtualization with NAS

To be clear, file-level data storage is by no means an incorrect choice for hypervisor environments. In fact, many administrators successfully run production workloads over a Network Attached Storage (NAS) framework using Open-E JovianDSS as their data storage software. Presenting storage resources via enterprise protocols like NFS or SMB offers distinct operational advantages, primarily centered around administrative simplicity. Because Open-E JovianDSS delivers this NAS file-level access on a rock-solid Linux and ZFS foundation, these environments still benefit from enterprise-grade data integrity, high availability, and storage efficiency features. A prime practical demonstration of this capability is the Open-E JovianDSS Integration with Proxmox VE via NFS, which delivers relatively high performance without block-level complexity. Ultimately, a properly deployed Open-E JovianDSS NAS configuration stands as a highly reliable and cost-effective architecture for production nodes.

The Problem with “Translation Layers”

Virtualization is inherently demanding. A hypervisor creates its own complex file system to manage virtual machine disks. While NAS configuration is still a valid choice for virtualization, it is limited in comparison to SAN systems based on our software.

Every I/O request must be translated through multiple layers of metadata management. SAN removes this friction. By presenting data storage as raw blocks via Open-E JovianDSS, you allow the hypervisor to communicate directly with the system.

NAS & SAN Comparison

While NAS is still a valid choice for virtualization, it still struggles to match the fundamental advantages granted by SAN:

The Critical Edge: Why SAN Remains the Perfect Choice for Virtualization

While a NAS approach offers excellent operational simplicity, a SAN architecture remains the premium standard for high-density, enterprise-scale virtualization. As highlighted in our architectural table, the core advantage of a SAN lies in its raw, block-level precision. By allowing the hypervisor to communicate directly with the storage blocks via Open-E JovianDSS, you eliminate the extra file-system translation layers that can introduce latency under heavy, mixed-I/O workloads like production databases. 

Furthermore, SAN architecture is fundamentally designed for multi-host cluster coordination, utilizing hardware-level locking mechanisms that ensure seamless virtual machine migrations and deep integration with hypervisor offloading features. When your infrastructure demands absolute performance predictability and the most robust path redundancy available, building your virtualized backend on a SAN architecture remains the definitive choice.

Achieve the Best Virtualization Performance Via Block-Level Control

Summing the topic up, NAS remains a valid choice for virtualization, but SAN has a unique performance advantage. If the speed of your system is the main priority, then SAN is a wise way to go!

Let’s sum up the main differences, pros, and cons:

Virtualization with NAS (File-Level)

The hypervisor connects to storage as a shared network folder (via NFS/SMB).

• PROS:
  • Simple Management: Easy to set up, mount, and manage with direct file visibility.
  • Cost-Effective: Uses standard, affordable network infrastructure.
  • Mainstream Ready: Perfect for standard workloads, routine applications, and simple provisioning.
• CONS:
  • Storage Friction: The hypervisor must translate I/O requests through multiple file-system and network layers.
  • Higher Latency: Multi-layer access to metadata causes variable and elevated latency under stress.
  • Performance Cap: Struggles to meet the demands of high-density or mission-critical workloads.

Virtualization with SAN (Block-Level)

The hypervisor treats remote storage as raw, local hard drives (via iSCSI/Fibre Channel).

• PROS:
  • Direct Communication: Bypasses translation layers, connecting the hypervisor directly to raw storage blocks.
  • Ultra-Low Latency: Delivers predictable, deterministic speed optimized for rapid random I/O.
  • Enterprise Power: Effortlessly handles heavy, mixed-I/O production workloads like large databases.
  • Seamless Clustering: Hardware-level locking enables smooth, zero-downtime VM live migrations.
  • Max Redundancy: Built-in multi-pathing eliminates single points of failure for continuous uptime.
• CONS:
  • High Complexity: Requires specialized expertise to configure and maintain block-level mapping.
  • Expensive Setup: Carries a high upfront cost for dedicated storage networking and hardware.

Feel free to download a 60-day free trial of Open-E JovianDSS and test it to see how it can power up your virtualized environments with the SAN setup.

The post Why SAN Data Storage is a Great Choice for Virtualization first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

• Strategic Control and Ownership: Digital sovereignty is defined by an organization’s ability to maintain absolute control over its data, including where it is stored, who can access it, and the legal jurisdiction that governs it.
• Mitigation of Third-Party Risks: Relying on public cloud providers can introduce risks of vendor lock-in, unauthorized access by foreign governments (e.g., under the Cloud Act), and unpredictable changes in service terms or pricing.
• On-Premises Infrastructure as a Solution: Implementing on-premises data storage provides a robust framework for sovereignty, allowing organizations to keep sensitive data within their own physical and digital boundaries to ensure compliance and security.
• Balance Between Innovation and Autonomy: While cloud services offer scalability, achieving true digital sovereignty requires full operational independence and the protection of stored information, all while maintaining uninterrupted availability.

What Is Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty is essentially about who owns the data and the IT infrastructure, and what measures are taken to ensure it stays safe and accessible.

It generally refers to two things:

• Control: Making sure the owner of the data has the power to protect it and use it at all times and under every circumstance.
• Location: Following laws that require data to be stored within a specific country or region.

Maintaining full control over data and ensuring sovereignty over it can pose a major challenge for data storage administrators, especially when it comes to storing data in locations where the data wasn’t originally generated. Protecting this information (and access to it) at all costs is crucial in order to achieve compliance with the law requirements.

Sharing this data with third-party companies (like external cloud service providers) means passing control over data to them. Unfortunately, when the data owner loses access to data, or the data is destroyed (either physically or on the digital level), the responsibility still stays with the data owner, and when it comes to storing personal information of e.g., customers, it can result in some serious consequences.

That’s why having your own on-premises data storage solution and its proper protection seems like the most responsible move. Yet – is there anything more to it?

Lack of Data Sovereignty in Real-Life Scenarios

While data sovereignty is often discussed in the abstract, the lack of it results in very real, horrific outcomes. These cases serve as a sobering reminder that your data is as safe as much control you have over it:

Case 1: Human Error and Systemic Oversight

In May 2024, Google Cloud inadvertently deleted the entire private cloud account of UniSuper, a $125 billion pension fund. This single incident was triggered by a routine maintenance procedure where an engineer misconfigured an internal tool, leading to the deletion of the subscription (and in turn data) across two separate geographies. This case demonstrates that even when data is stored within a major cloud provider’s infrastructure, a single human error can bypass automated safeguards and wipe out both primary data and backups. It proves that total reliance on an external provider’s data storage system means, in fact, a loss of digital autonomy.

Case 2: Physical Disaster and Infrastructure Negligence

The 2021 fire at OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data center illustrates how physical disasters can physically annihilate data sovereignty. Beyond the fire itself, a French court eventually ordered OVH to pay significant damages because the provider had stored client backups in the same physical building as the primary servers – contrary to safety expectations and, in some cases, contractual claims. When a disaster destroys a data center, you can’t do anything about it – the data is lost forever. It highlights that an external data storage can be easily wiped out through unwise system composition, in this case, considering the geographical residence of the original data and its backups.

Case 3: Kinetic Warfare

A landmark incident in March 2026 saw the physical targeting of data centers during an armed conflict between Iran and the U.S./Israel. Iranian drones struck Amazon Web Services (AWS) centers in the UAE and Bahrain, while retaliatory strikes hit facilities in Tehran. This case proves that even facilities that belong to commercial cloud providers, which are not directly involved in the conflict, can also become military targets. In a kinetic conflict, your data sovereignty is put to the test. If you hand over your data to a third-party solution provider, you lose data sovereignty even before a missile strikes. As you see, it is very possible that hosting data with “hyperscalers” can inadvertently place civilian assets directly in the crosshairs of global warfare.

Why an On-Premises Data Storage System Is Key for Maintaining Data Sovereignty

Your own data storage system gives you full control over the data you store. You decide who has access to which resources, and you can clearly see where the data is stored. You can also monitor the condition of both the software environment and the physical hardware setup to detect any errors and symptoms before any actual failure occurs. To streamline the system management, you can also consider recomposition of your current storage approach into a centralized data storage solution or switching to a hyper-converged storage infrastructure.

The on-premises data storage has many configuration options to choose from, and the level of defined data protection is totally up to you. At the same time, you may have some concerns, especially as running your own system requires buying your own hardware parts. Considering the rapid changes in hardware prices and availability, it may pose a challenge. The solution lies in using a software-defined storage solution like Open-E JovianDSS, which grants you an unique advantage of hardware agnosticism.

Hardware Agnosticism

Being one of the distinct features of Open-E JovianDSS, hardware agnosticism lets you build your data storage system with your components of choice. It lets you overcome the consequences of hardware price spikes, as well as its limited availability. With a hardware-agnostic data storage solution, you are able to choose from many alternative hardware components to find the configuration that best matches your budget and expectations. It also allows you to easily swap hardware if any part of your system fails.

How Data Sovereignty Enhances Business Resilience

Data sovereignty is a prime example of how maintaining absolute control over your digital assets directly strengthens your operational backbone. While often viewed through a technical lens, achieving true data autonomy poses a strategic advantage for organizations across all sectors, particularly those in critical infrastructure like energy, healthcare, and transport, where downtime or data loss is not an option.

By maintaining an on-premises data storage system, organizations exercise full sovereign control over their infrastructure & data. This ensures that sensitive operational intelligence remains insulated from geopolitical risks, international trade fluctuations, or unauthorized access by foreign service providers.

This setup transforms data management into a proactive defense mechanism. Through features like immutable snapshots and asynchronous replication, companies can bridge the gap between simple data storage and true operational endurance. Ultimately, an in-house, sovereign approach allows a business to treat its data as a “future-proof” asset, securing the digital autonomy required to thrive in an unpredictable global landscape.

Open-E JovianDSS – Where Data Protection Meets Data Sovereignty

Guaranteed Integrity and Business Continuity

• Ransomware-Resilient Snapshots: Using Copy-on-Write (COW) architecture, snapshots are read-only point-in-time copies. These provide an unalterable recovery mechanism.
• Active-Active HA Clustering: Open-E JovianDSS specializes in Active-Active High Availability, guaranteeing the availability of critical operations, a core pillar of both sovereignty and compliance.
• Backup Servers: with Open-E JovianDSS, you can set up both local and remote backup servers, which provide the ultimate On-  & Off-site Data Protection!
• Silent Data Corruption Protection: ZFS performs end-to-end integrity verification using checksums to proactively detect and correct “bit rot,” ensuring your data plane remains trustworthy.

Encryption and Access Control

• Native ZFS Encryption: Supports data-at-rest encryption where the administrator retains the keys, providing a safeguard against physical theft.
• Granular Delegation: Moving beyond simple root/non-root access, the zfs allow command enables precise role-based access to datasets, supporting Zero-Trust principles.

Save Your Company from Unnecessary Problems and Extra Expenses

By taking total control over the way you store and protect your data, you also avoid any unnecessary stress and financial consequences. With in-house data storage systems like those based on Open-E JovianDSS, you have a unique chance to deal with the consequences of ever-present digital threats, and you can minimize the chance of any hardware-related disaster.

Download the Open-E JovianDSS 60-day free trial to experience a new level of data storage system reliability!

The post How to Ensure Data Sovereignty with On-Premises Data Storage first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.

• Comprehensive Data Security: The software utilizes immutable snapshots to provide a definitive defense against ransomware, allowing businesses to revert systems to a pre-attack state without data loss or ransom payments.
• High Availability and Resilience: By leveraging ZFS-based self-healing, RAID configurations, and cluster options, the system ensures continuous data access and automatic recovery even in the event of hardware failures or local disasters.
• Infrastructure Flexibility: Its hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic nature prevents vendor lock-in, allowing companies to build tailored, evolving IT ecosystems using their preferred components and virtualized environments.
• Cost Optimization: Businesses can achieve significant savings – up to $350,000 over five years – through lower licensing fees, built-in backup tools, and energy-efficient virtualization features.

The global digitalization of information is a one-way ticket for most companies across the globe, and the only way to deal with it is to adapt. Though it provides numerous opportunities and makes information management easier, it also generates new challenges (& problems) for the internal IT teams. The need for flexible adjustments to changing market needs is very real and must often be matched with the rapid changes in terms of price and availability of solutions & hardware, which enable you to run your business efficiently and avoid disruptions in its operations, ultimately contributing to company resilience.

Open-E rises to the challenges of modern enterprise data storage tasks and goals, empowering companies’ growth all across the globe with solutions that not only provide major protective value, but also optimize budget and let you achieve great savings (even up to 350 000$ per system).

Curious how we achieve that for our customers to protect their business? Great! Let’s go through the complete overview of the most important aspects in which Open-E JovianDSS can support your business growth!

Ensuring Business Resilience with Proper Data Protection

Ransomware Protection for Protecting Businesses

According to invenioit.com, around 35% of cyberattacks include ransomware, and 91% of ransomware attack cases include stealing data too! As this data is alarming, it is also surprising that only 50% companies conduct annual protection tests, while the total data breach cost can reach even up to $5 million!

This is a clear message that it can happen to anyone at any time. Prevention is key to avoiding the ransomware threat. By being very cautious about the received links, your colleagues lower the probability of the attack. Unfortunately, as hackers still get more experienced, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between genuine, safe messages and malicious ones. The problem becomes even more serious if we consider how AI is continually improving at mimicking the content and behavior typical of real people. So what if we miss something, and the attack strikes? Open-E has a solution for growing your business securely!

ZFS Snapshots: Immutable Ransomware Defense

The snapshot feature included in Open-E JovianDSS lets you easily remove any effects of the ransomware attack, as if it never happened:

This way, you resume the business operations, ensuring business resilience and avoiding any consequences related to interrupted business continuity, data loss, or paying ransom.

Overcoming Hardware Failures and System Malfunctions for Business Protection

Every piece of hardware will fail at some point.

That’s why Open-E JovianDSS has plenty of solutions up its sleeve to let you prepare for any disruptive scenario related to it, helping grow your company.

Open-E JovianDSS is a ZFS-based data storage solution. It supports Mirror and RAID-Z configurations. These configurations ensure data protection in case of disk failure. If one or more disks in the setup fail, you can replace them with new ones. The data will then be automatically regenerated using information stored on the remaining connected disks.

You can take your hardware-level data protection strategy to the next level by implementing a shared or non-shared cluster. You can also extend it further with a backup node to achieve not only High Availability of your data but also Off-Site Data Protection. This way, you overcome many disruptive scenarios, from a node failure to the local facility being burnt to the ground or flooded.

Data protection features granted by Open-E JovianDSS, which let you overcome hardware problems:

• Mirror and RAID-Z Configurations
  Ensure data redundancy by allowing disk replacement and automatic data regeneration if one or multiple disks fail.
• Shared or Non-Shared Storage Cluster
  Enhances hardware-level data protection by enabling clustering options for High Availability, resulting in better fault tolerance. Guarantees continuous data access even in the event of node failure.
• Backup Node
  Provides an additional layer of protection. Combined with High Availability Cluster, grants the Off-Site Data Protection. 
• Open-E JovianDSS On- & Off-Site Data Protection
  Since one backup is never enough, Open-E JovianDSS allows you to store copies in multiple locations. You can keep backups locally for instant recovery and off-site for extra geographic protection. 

Having an extra safety option shouldn’t be something extra – it is the foundation of your business resilience!

Yet, as hardware represents a physical side of your data storage solution, there is also a lot going on at the cellular level. With millions of read and write operations, even the most reliable system can generate some errors. That’s why you need a way to detect them! ZFS provides a feature called self-healing that spots any inconsistencies in the data and corrects them! You can also run such a check manually with a scrubbing process.

So what’s the best part about protecting your data with Open-E JovianDSS?It protects your data with a multi-layered protection strategy, starting from analyzing individual pieces of data to protecting your data in a geographically diversified configuration, which is crucial for business continuity.

An Efficient Budget That Boosts Your Business Resilience

Virtualization: Cutting Costs While Keeping the Quality

Virtualization can be a game-changer for data storage systems. The most obvious benefit is that it simplifies the management of the entire system. You can see everything on a single pane of glass and manage it immediately. Setting up new virtual machines is also streamlined, along with providing them with proper data storage resources. All of these aspects that make your IT work easier and more efficient come with extra cost savings, boosting company growth.

In conclusion, virtualization not only makes data storage management easier, faster, and less complicated, but it also allows you to achieve extra energy savings by using your own hardware most efficiently!

The Freedom of Hypervisor-agnosticism & Hardware-agnosticism

With Open-E JovianDSS, you can build a tailored data storage system, matching capacity, JBODs, and network adapters. Its hypervisor-agnosticism gives you the freedom to choose the best hypervisor and set up a hyper-converged infrastructure.While market prices for hardware are constantly changing, you can still seek solutions that help you reduce costs. Open-E JovianDSS offers hardware agnosticism – a high compatibility with diverse hardware, enabling you to build an ultimate, evolving IT ecosystem. This key feature enables your system to adapt to market shifts, effectively supporting business flexibility.

Optimizing Total Cost of Ownership for Business Resilience

At this point, you are probably aware of what you need to invest in to build a safe, efficient, and good-performing data storage system. Let’s make it even more precise. Here is a detailed list of all the most important things you need to take care of or provide to build your data storage infrastructure, including both physical components, virtual assets, and the additional work:

• Servers
• Data Storage Devices
• Network Equipment
• Rack and Power Equipment
• Software
• Configuration of the system
• Additional backup tool
• Energy (to power up the infrastructure)
• System maintenance
• And that’s still not everything.

When we sum it up, the final Total Cost of Ownership can be overwhelming… but not with Open-E JovianDSS.

Let’s start with the fact that our software provides the backup tools itself, so there is no need to look for an additional backup solution. Being a virtualization-friendly software, Open-E JovianDSS also enables you to reduce energy costs. Being hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic, it allows you to choose the components that best match your budget without sacrificing performance value. What’s more, Open-E JovianDSS license prices are significantly lower than competing solutions, offering many identical features at a much more attractive price.

The result is that with Open-E JovianDSS, you can achieve:

• Up to $65,000 savings on the initial setup costs
• Up to $57,00 savings on total annual ongoing costs
• And up to $350,000 savings of the total costs over 5 years.

Feel free to download the 60-day free trial of Open-E JovianDSS, and if you would like to learn more about the software, its capabilities, and how it can fit in your specified goals and challenges, feel free to contact our team! We will be more than glad to help you achieve better results for your business resilience!

The post How To Increase Business Resilience with Good Data Storage Software first appeared on Open-E Blog | Data Storage Software for Enterprise NAS & SAN.