Replibit - Release Notes for 8.5.0

Release Overview

Replibit 8.5.0 is a maintenance release. The primary focus of this release is the new AirGap feature, aimed at reducing the risks presented by potential malicious actors. This release also includes improvements to AutoVerify. 

Major Features Summary

• AirGap
• AutoVerify enhancements 

Summary of AirGap

• AirGap is a new feature that applies to Axcient Replibit Cloud vaults and local appliances.
• Deleted protected systems are not immediately purged, but rather retained for a period of time.
• While in retention, protected systems can be restored to production by the Axcient Support team.
• Deleted protected systems are purged after a retention period of several days.
• Factory Reset and Destroy Pool operations have been removed from the UI.

Summary of AutoVerify Improvements

• An issue where an infinite number of reboots could occur during a BootVM check has been fixed.
• The maximum runtime for AutoVerify tests has been increased to allow more systems time to complete successfully.
• Full backup scans initiated by AutoVerify now honor the backup schedule.

Bug Fixes

• An issue preventing Dell OEM protected systems from being virtualized has been fixed.
• Communication timeout for telemetry reporting has been increased.

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New Feature Details

AirGap

High-profile malicious attacks against Managed Service Providers and their customers have dramatically increased in 2019. 

A popular attack is the use of keyloggers (introduced into production environments through phishing or other attacks) which compromise backup and disaster recovery servers along with the primary server targets. 

AirGap (formerly Safety Archive) is a new feature of Replibit, intended to make it much more difficult to immediately destroy backup data within the product and provide some level of protection against such destructive attacks. 

Protected systems that are deleted when the AirGap is present (in v8.5.0 and newer) are not immediately removed from disk storage but are instead moved into the AIrGap archive system.  The protected system will be removed from the UI, and any endpoint licenses assigned will be returned to the system.  (Storage license usage will not be returned, since the physical storage pool utilization is not reduced while the protected system resides in the AirGap.)

Deleted protected systems held within the AirGap will be retained for several days before being purged by the cleanup process.  This window of time is intended to provide partners with an opportunity to respond to potential attacks against their customers and greatly enhances their chances for successful recovery of data.

Other Product Enhancements

AutoVerify Enhancement

Changes to AutoVerify based on customer escalation tickets have been included in this release. Increases to timeouts for each testing phase are included, in addition to fixes to testing logic and self-healing. 

More hardening of AutoVerify is anticipated to be performed over the next several releases.

Bug Fixes

This release contains bug fixes to resolve issues when virtualizing some Dell OEM-branded protected systems and problems with telemetry reporting experienced by some devices.

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Auto Update Best Practices

We recommend that Enable Auto Update is enabled on the Settings -> Update Manager page on each of your Replibit devices. 

We also recommend that you enable Auto-Enable Remote Assist When Upgrading so that remote access will be available to our development team should something go wrong with your upgrade.

This will ensure that your Replibit devices are updated with the latest software enhancements in a timely fashion, and that the Replibit Support team will have a short window of time to access and repair any troublesome devices without requiring user intervention.

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