When discussing cyber resilience, much of the focus falls on immutability, air gaps, and backup validation. All critical components, but infrastructure architecture is just as important, particularly when recovery speed and data availability are on the line.
At Silverstring, we’re have started building IBM FlashSystem’s grid architecture into our services as a way to bake in additional resilience and enable faster, more scalable recovery during a cyber event.
Understanding the Grid
The FlashSystem grid is built on a scale-out architecture, where multiple storage controllers work together to deliver a single pool of performance and capacity. Unlike traditional SAN deployments that rely heavily on centralised control or limited active/passive configurations, a grid design distributes workloads and data paths across all nodes.
This approach offers three key advantages from a cyber resilience standpoint:
1. No Single Point of Bottleneck
Recovery from a major incident often involves restoring large volumes of data across multiple workloads simultaneously. In a traditional setup, all of that traffic may hit the same controller or backend, slowing the process.
With a grid, workloads are distributed across controllers, improving throughput and reducing recovery time.
2. Increased Fault Tolerance
Because the system is built from multiple active nodes, the failure of one node (planned or unplanned) doesn’t interrupt operations. This is critical when recovering under pressure, where infrastructure downtime compounds the impact of the incident.
3. Scalable Recovery
Recovery isn’t just about restoring data—it’s about validating it, scanning for malware, and often recovering into isolated cleanrooms. A grid makes it possible to run multiple recovery workflows in parallel without contention. As environments scale, performance scales too.
Why Silverstring is Standardising on This Approach
In our Cyber Resilient Data Storage & Recovery services, powered by IBM FlashSystem and Predatar, we’re building FlashSystem grid architectures into client environments to support:
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Concurrent cleanroom testing and validation
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Higher-speed data restores across critical workloads
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Increased tolerance to hardware issues during recovery windows
It’s not just about performance, it’s about ensuring the infrastructure doesn’t become the constraint during recovery.
For organisations focused on hardening their recovery posture, this architecture gives us a platform that aligns with modern cyber resilience principles: decentralised control, built-in failover, and parallel processing of recovery operations.
As threats become more complex and recovery demands increase, we believe infrastructure design needs to evolve too. The FlashSystem grid model isn’t just a storage upgrade—it’s a resilience enabler, and we’re baking it directly into how we deliver protection and recovery for our clients.
Want to understand how this fits into our wider cyber recovery approach? Contact us here.
