ONTAP Discussions

Missing features on Storage ... encryption, compression, ...

eric_franckx
2,081 Views

Hi,

more and more customers in outsourcing business have some questions about the protection of their data. Most of the solution on the market, are dedicated for data on tape (client encryption via agent, hardware compression on tape device) but solution to encrypt online (Tier-1) data are very limited and rare.

Why Netapp  doesn't provide a integrated, easy solution on their filer ?

  • the solution should be available as the dedup feature:
    • easy to use,
    • activate/deactivate on volume level
    • should be able to specify some parameters as key type, key length
    • add user/host security feature to allow the access to the volume
    • could as for memory with PAM card they could use dedicated GPU card for the computing requirement of encryption/decryption:
      • doesn't impact the CPUs for the standard I/O
      • this type of card could also be used for snapmirror, snapvault, dedup if the Ontap detect the presence of the card

Some people will tell use Decru ... ok but in a network storage infrascture the actual supported connection is 1GB per head, so in a virtualized envrionment or you will need a lot of head or you should go to FC. So not the best solution and also the cost is 'inaccepatble'

Also dedup is a very good feature and to a great job on virtualized environment for example with VMWARE vmdk file on datatsore (=volume on Netapp). But for some type of data, dedup doesn't offer a very good "win". Take the case of database (Oracle). You win near nothing when you try to activate dedup on volume dedicated to Oracle database. But if you could use compress to compress on block level as Oracle offers with is advance compression feature in Oracle 11g R2. You could win between 40  to 60 % of space.

Compresion on storage level shoudl also be available as dedup feature:

  • should be available on volume level --> activate/deactivate for volume
  • to computing required by compress could be help by GPU card
  • will reduce space requirement
  • will reduce transfer of data with snapmirror --> (compression already available with gzip to compress data before sending to destination) but could be CPU intensive.

Regards,

Eric

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eric_franckx
2,081 Views

Any opinion ?

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