Re: [Veritas-bu] Encryption - LTO-4 or Media Server

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Jeffery Price <jeffery.price AT aes DOT com> wrote:

We are considering NBU Media Server encryption rather then LTO-4 encryption. I know there is potentially a performance hit at the media server

Potentially? There's no doubt about it - you're doing more work so you *will* take a performance hit. How much depends on the server. I see below you're using V440s. I would guess that's not going to be an insignificant hit.

We are NBU 6.5.2a Solaris 9 master, another Solaris 9 media, stretched metro SAN, LTO-2 drives (moving to LTO-4), EMC CDL700 (moving to DL3D). Hardware for both master and media is SUN V440 4CPU@1062MHz 8GB RAM. Also use VCB proxy host (W2K3), and remote media servers (windows) for Puredisk.

If your tape drives are not running at full capacity now, moving to LTO-4 may result in a performance decrease. A V440 is old and I would be shocked if it could drive many (any) LTO-4 drives at full speed. 8GB of ram isn't much either.

Just wanted to see what others are doing, and if anyone has any good/bad experiences with either one.

Decru encryption appliances. We love 'em. They have a practical limitation of about 2 LTO-3 drives per FC520. I don't know what the maximum throughput of an LTO-4 is but you may be limited to 1 drive per FC520, or go with the new Brocade encrypting switches (pricey but apparently very fast).

.../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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