BlueBoxx is a fault-tolerant and high-performance platform for all IT applications within a company.
The following figure illustrates the architecture of our BlueBoxx solutions.
We, as Sphinx, have made it our mission, to develop innovative solutions which are tailored to our customers. You can find out, how we approach such challenges in "The Sphinx Approach".
An example for a use-case, where we have decided an innovative solution, which is easily realizable and comprehensible for our customers has to be developed, are backup systems. While many companies already have understood the importance of backups and also have implemented them, often a hollistic view of the whole system is missing. Because even if each individual component is running smoothly, if the big picture is missing and the parts are not assembled correctly a small issue can cause the entire system to come to a halt. An example for such a scenario will follow in the next part, but first a little summary on why a functioning backup infrastructure is so important.
IT systems are crucial for businesses, which is why a failure can lead to significant financial losses. Therefore, IT resilience, which refers to the ability of IT systems to remain available even during unexpected events such as natural disasters or cyber attacks, is an essential aspect for every business. To strengthen IT resilience within a company, it's necessary to prepare for catastrophes and above all, know how to react towards such quickly. Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are two concepts that can help companies with that. Business Continuity aims to make sure, that a company stays operational during and after a catastrophe. Disaster Recovery on the other hand concentrates on restoring the IT systems, data and infrastructure which support those operations.
The most important step for a successful business continuity is creating a risk analysis, which considers themes like natural catastrophes, cyber attacks, power outages and human failure, as well as their influence on business processes and the IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is very important to define these first, as to not overlook a potential vulnerability. Furthermore, defining the lines of communication for customers and employees is from utmost importance, as well as creating business continuity plans containing scenarios on how to react if different possible risks come to pass. After creating all these plans, implementing them by passing on the information to customers and employees, as well as conducting trainings is an important step. Regular tests and reviewing and updating these plans is crucial. To be able to prepare the plans for disaster recovery, the following questions have to be answered:
On the basis of these answers the recovery time objective and recovery point objective are being set.
But now let us return to the example of a common backup system.
The following figure shows a common backup system for an online-shop. Each of the applications makes a daily backup, which is transferred to and saved on the backup-server. In this scenario each person responsible for one of the applications has done her or his job right and has implemented the necessary backup infrastructure for their application. However, as one can see in the figure, the backup systems have not been synchronized. The daily backups are being done and sent to the backup-server at different times.
This leads to the following scenario: if a transaction is taking place exactly in the timeframe between different backups and the webserver crashes within this timeframe as well due to a natural disaster, a power outage or due to other reasons, backups of all systems will exist, however they will not have the same state. In this case, for example, an item has been purchased via the webshop, the customer has already paid for the item and has received a confirmation mail. However, by only looking at the backups one could not figure out this scenario, due to the webserver having crashed within the timeframe between backups. In this case the server crashed after a backup has been made of the items that have been added to the shopping cart, but before a backup has been made of the transaction finishing the order process and also before the mailserver has started its backup.
Due to that after restoring the backups one could trace, that a customer was in the process of making a purchase and also already had added an item to the shopping card, however one could not, based on the backups alone, figure out if the customers has also already paid for the purchase or if the customer has already received the confirmation mail. To reproduce the exact scenario that took place closely to the crash, one now would have to free resources to sort out these kind of scenarios and not just for this one transaction, but for all transactions that took place in the timeframe between the backups.
So if everyone has done their job right, what has gone wrong in the scenario above? Many companies are missing the holistic view of the backup infrastructure, which is the reason why such mistakes can happen.
We, as Sphinx, have developed BlueBoxx as a solution for such scenarios. It is a holistic backup solution, where all virtual machines are running on the same server and solely atomic transactions are used. Due to that all backups always happen at the same time and therefore no deviation between the backups, as has been shown in the figure above, is possible anymore. Furthermore, BlueBoxx offer the possibility to keep data loss to within minutes and secures the data against common security issues such as encryption trojans. Also it enhances IT resilience.
BlueBoxx offers several benefits for a company.
High Availability: This is achieved through complete redundancy. BlueBoxx is designed to be fully redundant down to its last component, ensuring no single point of failure.
Infrastructure as a Service: Needed virtual machines can be provisioned within minutes via GUI. Also, the management through GUI or command-line from within an existing automation tool simplifies handling. Furthermore, the administration dashboard can be chosen freely.
High-Performance: BlueBoxx guarantees for both of the two variants offered by us a high performance.
Near Zero Data Loss Backups: This is ensured through atomic snapshots of the entire environment and immutable data protection. Traditional backups are thus only necessary in exceptional cases anymore. Also regular restore tests and daily operational handling are no longer required due to BlueBoxx. Snapshot mechanisms below the virtualization layer, which allow for near-realtime distribution to any number of remote sites, are one of the reasons for the elimination of these extra efforts. Without additional costs or effort, this results in a recovery point objective which is only in the minute range while the recovery time objective is even in the range of seconds. Moreover, snapshots themselves are immutable and secure against changes and man-in-the-middle attacks. Additional encryption also allows storing them in public cloud environments.
No Vendor Lock-in: BlueBoxx exclusively employs open-source solutions thus preventing vendor lock-in. Moreover, we aim for a sustainable approach by reusing existing hardware. Thanks to our 'Moving Migration' offer, the migration to pre-existing hardware can even be done while operational with minimal downtimes.
Ransomware-Proof: Because an unalterable and atomic snapshot is made every 5 minutes, a rollback to a point before the ransomware attack can be performed within seconds. Even taking the best security measures, a hacker attack, resulting in the encryption of the data across the entire system, can not always be prevented. According to studies this can lead to a standstill of the entire company for several days. With BlueBoxx though, a complete and consistent restoration of the entire application world can be guaranteed within a few minutes or even seconds.
Full Management and Monitoring: BlueBoxx is provided as a managed service by the Sphinx team and comes with 7x24 proactive monitoring. Therefore, security patches, hardware issues, and performance problems are taken care of by the Sphinx Team for customers using BlueBoxx.
BlueBoxx is offered in two different variants: