Partner Session

Hitatchi Vantara: The Problem with Protecting Your Data

Ransomware continues to disrupt businesses worldwide, making proactive preparation and strong data protection essential. As organizations turn to immutable backup systems, choosing the right solution can be challenging. This session explores how the Hitachi Vantara Data Fortress powered by Commvault helps strengthen security and resilience against ransomware.

About This Session

Hitachi Vantara and Commvault’s Data Fortress delivers a multilayered, cyber-resilient architecture designed to protect, isolate, and rapidly recover data in the wake of ransomware attacks. As breaches grow more frequent and sophisticated, Data Fortress provides the secure foundation enterprises need to withstand and rebound from identity compromise, hypervisor encryption, and large-scale operational disruption.

Real-world attacks like the MGM ransomware incident demonstrate the catastrophic financial and operational consequences of inadequate recovery strategies. MGM suffered encrypted hypervisors, data theft, five weeks of disrupted operations, $100M in business losses, and a $30M ransom demand—all triggered by a single social-engineering entry point. Data Fortress is engineered specifically to prevent these outcomes by ensuring clean, immutable data is instantly recoverable.

The Data Fortress architecture secures backups through HSX appliances, immutable snapshots, hardware root of trust, and isolated recovery environments (IREs). By transporting data through private fiber-channel and encrypted pathways, the solution ensures backups remain untouched by attackers—even when production systems are compromised.

A dedicated control plane and isolated recovery workflow allow organizations to quickly restore applications from known-good, immutable copies using Commvault orchestration. This eliminates the risk of reinfection, accelerates recovery timelines, and enables clean, confident restoration of hypervisors, databases, and file servers.

Built on Hitachi’s 100% data availability guarantee and Commvault’s leading cyber recovery automation, Data Fortress gives organizations the assurance that—even during an encryption event—critical data and systems can be restored rapidly and securely. This holistic, hardware-to-software approach maximizes resilience against evolving ransomware threats.

Key Takeaways

Data Fortress delivers rapid, clean recovery by combining immutable storage, isolated environments, and Commvault orchestration.
The MGM ransomware case illustrates the high cost of unpreparedness, with $100M+ in losses and weeks of downtime.
Secure pathways—private fiber channel + encrypted links—ensure backup copies remain protected even during active attacks.
A hardware root of trust and immutable snapshots provide long-term defensibility and confidence that recovery data is uncompromised.
The architecture supports full application restoration inside an isolated recovery environment, eliminating reinfection risk.
Data Fortress transforms ransomware recovery from days or weeks to immediate, orchestrated restoration.

Learn more

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Data Fortress and how does it protect against ransomware?

Data Fortress is a joint Hitachi Vantara and Commvault cyber-resilience architecture that uses immutable snapshots, isolated recovery environments, hardware encryption, and secure fiber-channel pathways to protect data and provide fast, clean recovery after ransomware attacks.

How does Data Fortress help prevent reinfection during recovery?

By restoring workloads within a fully isolated recovery environment (IRE) using immutable data copies, Data Fortress ensures that systems are rebuilt from known-good sources—eliminating hidden malware, persistence mechanisms, or reinfection risks.

How does Commvault orchestration accelerate ransomware recovery?

Commvault automates the “snap-on-snap” process, enabling clean snapshot creation, rapid validation, and immediate restoration to hypervisors and applications—reducing recovery times from weeks to hours.

What makes the Data Fortress architecture more secure than traditional DR solutions?

Traditional disaster recovery assumes natural disasters, not active adversaries. Data Fortress adds hardware root of trust, encrypted transport links, immutable storage, isolated control planes, and automated clean recovery—built specifically for cyber threats.

Transcript

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Hello, my name is Richie Blount and I’m a lead technical expert with Hitachi Vantara.

And today we want to introduce you to a new solution that Hitachi and Commvault have
brought to the market, our Data Fortress.

The Data Fortress helps not only to protect data, but it helps to protect data in a
ransomware recovery event.

And so we know there’s numerous things that can impact our operations.

Things from hardware or system failures, geographical events such as tornadoes,
hurricanes, floods, even power outages.

But today we’re going to focus on ransomware.

And we know that data breaches are increasing year over year.

So are the number of threat actors in their level of sophistication.

And so no matter how well we prepare, sometimes the unexpected happens.

Let’s take a look at MGM.

MGM was attacked with a phishing scheme where hackers impersonated an employee simply
using LinkedIn information to fool the IT help desk for system access.

When MGM found the initial attack, they turned off their authentication services to try
and lock out the attacker.

Unfortunately, the damage was already done and they had encrypted more than a hundred
hypervisors in the environment.

So what was the impact to MGM?

Well, first of all, their customers had their data stolen.

Many of them were locked out of the hotel and check-ins were compromised.

A ransomware demand of $30 million was made.

$15 million was paid.

They had a total loss of business of $100 million and they had to pay overtime and
consulting fees of $10 million.

And recovery time?

Well, the core applications took 10 days, but the full return to operations

took five weeks in total.

So how does this data fortress help our customers?

Well, first of all, we provide a remedy for a cyber attack because we provide the restore
capabilities immediately.

As you notice here, we have our production environment where we’re backing up our file
servers, our virtualized environment, our database servers to an HSX

appliance.

We can also move data off of block storage by way of IntelliSnap onto that HSX
environment.

That block array also has private fiber channel connections over into the cyber recovery
environment.

Now notice we have two connections here.

One a private fiber channel connection as well as a secure encrypted connection into that
data fortress.

Within the data fortress,

we have our control plane already built out because we cannot expect to be able to
leverage any of the production elements because they will be in a quarantine environment.

And then lastly, notice we have within the recovery environment and beside our data
fortress, the isolated or the IRE environment where now we can restore all of those

applications and its resources in its fullness.

So the basis of this platform is built on hardware root of trust.

We then add a layer of hardware encryption on top of that.

And then at the application layer, we leverage our space efficient, immutable, long-term
retention snapshots, then Hitachi’s 100 % data availability guarantee.

So that when that time comes, customers have a high level of confidence

that not only can they recover their data, but those systems that they’ve invested in will
be available.

So now, let’s take a look at what happens when that encryption event occurs.

So now we have our immutable copies landing on the Hitachi storage array.

They’re being moved over private fiber channel connections over to the secondary Hitachi
array inside of that data fortress.

Well now,

we can begin the process by way of Commvault orchestration of creating those snap on snap
copies.

So we’re taking those immutable copies, we’re creating a secondary copy of those oh safe
snaps, and then we’re presenting those to the hypervisors so that they can then quickly

bring up those applications.

And so how can customers prepare?

Well, it’s been a challenge because if we leverage classic backup technologies, they take
a long time to recover and require additional space.

Our solution introduces fast recovery for large amounts of data without needing additional
space.

Customers have often leveraged uh storage-based snapshots, but many times those are not
application consistent.

Our solution provides application consistent recovery so that we ensure that we protect
all of the data.

And lastly, preparedness.

IT organizations have not always been able to recover confidently because they cannot
rehearse those recovery scenarios.

With our environment, those resources are available 24 by 7 so that they can test that
recovery

any hour of the day, in any day of the week.

So our resiliency is based on confidence.

Confidence in the immutability in the encryption.

Our confidence in that air gap technology.

We know that it’s reliable with our unique integration with Commvault.

You’ve got those application consistent data copies.

And it’s fast.

The super quick recovery using Snap-on-Snap technology and Commvault’s orchestration
capability.

So in summary, we want to be able to protect that data to identify that point of attack
through technologies like ThreatScan.

We want to be able to leverage our SafeSnap so that we can cover massive amounts of data
very quickly.

We want to be able to power up and get things going quickly by recovering those systems
and making sure that we recover every bit of data with those application consistent

snapshots.

And then…

we want to expose that environment and get going again.

So with that, I hope you will take the time to investigate our Data Fortress Solution.

Have a great day.