What is NeuShield Datacenter Edition?

NeuShield Data Sentinel Datacenter Edition is another edition of the NeuShield Data Sentinel product. NeuShield offers four editions: Free, Home, Business, and Datacenter, with each edition offering more features than the last. The Datacenter Edition is a superset of all editions, including all the features that NeuShield offers.

Some of the key features of the Datacenter Edition are database protection and recovery. With database protection, NeuShield can prevent ransomware or other threats from encrypting or damaging the SQL database data files. In addition, it can protect the database from being exfiltrated, ensuring that remote or local attackers are unable to steal your valuable data.

With database recovery, NeuShield allows you to bring back your database to a known good state within minutes, in case of an error. The entire database, along with all the supplementary binaries and files for the database instance, is restored together as a set, ensuring that your database will be up and running quickly without requiring a database administrator to rebuild it.

Database Guardian

Database Guardian offers the ability to protect the database data files from being modified. When Database Guardian is enabled, it will prevent modifications to all files in the 'Data' folder. If there are multiple Data folders or multiple instances of SQL, then all of the Data folders will be protected. This helps prevent the SQL data files from being ransomed.

Database Guardian is different from Mirror Shielding. Whereas Mirror Shielding redirects changes to an overlay, Database Guardian prevents modifying the data altogether.

Database Recovery

Database recovery uses NeuShield's One-Click Restore to perform the recovery. When database recovery is initiated, it restores the entire operating system, the database data files, the SQL configuration, and the SQL binary files (including the SQL service) as a set. This helps ensure that the server will be back up and running the same as it was before the incident.

This is important because many times, after an attack, the whole SQL server will not be working correctly. The SQL services may be broken, the SQL configuration may be damaged, and this would typically require rebuilding the server from scratch. A normal database restore may not be possible since the server is not running correctly. However, because NeuShield's database recovery restores all of these things together as a set, it is able to recover from just about any type of an attack.

Exfiltration Protection

Exfiltration protection is designed to prevent local or remote attackers from stealing data files from the database server. This is done by hiding the data files. Similar to Database Guardian, which prevents the data files from being modified, with exfiltration protection, the files are completely hidden from any application or program. Attackers or malicious insiders will not be able to see the SQL files and will not be able to steal them or copy them off the disk.

Large Disk and File Support

The Datacenter Edition also offers large disk and file support. Large disk support is specifically for Mirror Shielding. For database protection and recovery, there is no limit to the size of data we can protect and recover. However, for Mirror Shielding, there is a limit based on how much data is being protected on each disk volume. With the Business Edition, we can protect up to 2 GB of data per disk volume. However, with the Datacenter Edition, we can protect up to 64 TB of data per disk volume. There is no limit to the number of disk volumes supported or the size of each disk volume, as long as no more than 64 TB of data is protected on each volume. This makes the Datacenter Edition ideal for protecting servers with a large amount of data.

Large file support also only affects Mirror Shielding. With the Business Edition, we can protect files up to 512 GB in size. Whereas, with the Datacenter Edition, we can protect files up to 2 TB in size. By default, for both editions, only 2 GB files can be protected. So, if you want to protect files larger than 2 GB, then you need to configure that in the NeuShield Portal.