Cristie Adds S3-to-Tape Retention to Cristie Recovery Solution Powered by Rubrik

Cristie announced Cristie S3‑2‑Tape, a new value‑add option for Cristie Recovery Solution powered by Rubrik (CRS‑r).The option enables secure, policy‑driven transfer of S3 object data directly to tape, providing immutable, air‑gapped long‑term retention and an additional layer of ransomware protection for European organizations and the partners who serve them.

What it does
Cristie S3‑2‑Tape extends CRS‑r with a tape‑based retention tier. Backup and archive data can be written to tape under WORM and retention policies, helping protect long-term copies from modification or deletion, including scenarios involving operational mistakes or compromised administrative accounts.

The option is aimed at organizations with long retention obligations and large data volumes — public sector, healthcare, research, media, finance and manufacturing — where keeping years of data on primary or disk‑based storage is neither economical nor, in some cases, defensible.

How it works
The option is built on Cristie Archival Gateway, a software‑based object storage layer that supports tape libraries as archive storage. The Archival Gateway provides a standardized S3 REST API to applications that need to archive data, and abstracts from the underlying tape storage systems, which are freely selectable and exchangeable.

In practice, CRS‑r writes to what looks like an ordinary S3 target.

As an interface for applications that need to archive data, the Archival Gateway provides a standardized S3 REST API. Thus, the software can be used without any adaptations for the strongly increasing number of applications supporting object-based storage based on S3 REST. The concept of the Archival Gateway abstracts from the used tape storage systems which are freely selectable and exchangeable. The gateway is designed for scalable parallelism and high transfer rates, depending on deployment architecture, tape library configuration and workload profile.

Cristie Archival Gateway writes object data directly to the tape media and does not require buffer hard disks. Therefore, cumbersome S3 Glacier commands for reading the archived data are not necessary.

The solution may be purchased as hardware- or virtual appliance to any solution that needs to store on tape. Cristie provides it due to the high request as an option in our Cristie Recovery Solution concept.

Why it matters
Backup copies are now a primary target, not collateral damage. Attackers who reach the network routinely go after the backup repository before triggering encryption — which is exactly why regulators have moved from “take backups” to “prove the backup survives and restores”.

Tape answers that in a way software alone cannot. Once exported and stored offline, the tape copy is no longer network-addressable, reducing exposure to network-borne attacks. Combined with Cristie Recovery Assurance — automated restore testing, clean‑room recovery verification and recovery orchestration, included as standard in CRS‑r — customers get both halves of the equation: a copy that cannot be destroyed, and evidence that it comes back.

There is an operational argument too. Tape draws no power at rest, lowering both cost and energy footprint for the retention tier, and it removes the egress and retrieval charges that make long‑term cloud archive tiers unpredictable to budget.

Compliance and how we support

Click to enlarge

Availability
Cristie S3‑2‑Tape is available now as an option to Cristie Recovery Solution powered by Rubrik (CRS‑r), through Cristie’s European partner network of MSPs, distributors and resellers, on Cristie’s monthly pay‑per‑use and subscription models.

“Immutability in software is necessary but no longer sufficient. Our partners are being asked, by auditors and by their own customers, to show a copy that is physically out of reach — and to show it restores. Cristie S3‑2‑Tape closes that gap inside the solution they already run.”

If you run CRS‑r MSP Edition, it’s already in your portal
The tape tier is integrated into Cloutility Self-Service Portal, so you’re not adding a second console:

1. Tenants create their own users and buckets and set authorizations themselves
2. Storage, repositories and permissions organized in your existing reseller/customer/department hierarchy
3. One control point for Rubrik and the tape tier together
4. Recurring billing automated across every tenant on subscription
5. Custom reporting, monitoring and alerting across the whole estate
6. RESTful Admin API and SNMP on the gateway for your own automation and monitoring