This implementation will be in a medical environment.  One or our priorities is 
protecting patient's health information.  It all has something to do with this 
thing call HIPPA.  There have been lawsuits from just a patient name and 
diagnosis.
 
Thanks,
Kevin

>>> Nick Laflamme <dplaflamme AT GMAIL DOT COM> 7/2/2012 5:35 PM >>>
On Jul 2, 2012, at 9:35 AM, Kevin Boatright wrote:

> We are currently looking at adding a Disk to Disk backup solution.  Our 
> current solution has a 3584 tape library with LTO-5 drives using TKLM.
> 
> We have looked at Exagrid and Data Domain.  Also, I believe HP has a solution.
> 
> We will need to have encryption on the device and the ability to replicate 
> between the two disk units.

Why do you have to have encryption on the device? 

No, that wasn't a sarcastic question. 

If someone pulls a disk out of your DataDomain RAID, what can they do with it? 
Your data is striped across many drives, in chunks that are admittedly large 
enough to have a whole mailing address on it. Is someone afraid that someone 
else will steal one or more drives and then read unstructured streams of data 
looking for PII? Really? 

There's no chance that a tape will fall off a truck as you ship your backups 
off site. Sure, encrypt the VPN between sites, or use a dedicated network. But 
that doesn't mean you have to encrypt your data on the appliance, unless you're 
more paranoid than I am (or answer to people who are more paranoid than I am). 
At this point, I start worrying more about debacles from poor implementation or 
management of encryption than I do about loss of unencrypted data.  

> Anyone have any comments or recommendations?  

Besides DataDomain, HP, and IBM, I'm sure the rest of EMC, Oracle, and even 
small brands like Coraid would propose different solutions. For example, why 
not replicate cheap disk, on top of which you build FILE devices? Do you need 
the cost of a DataDomain or ProtecTier front-end, or do you just replicate 
unduplicated data? Oracle and Coraid will sell you large arrays of cheap disk 
with ZFS front-ends that could replicate data if you need it and could 
deduplicate the data as justified. I'm not saying I'd want to bet my job on 
Coraid, but others find there cost advantage over DataDomain attractive. 

> Thanks,
> Kevin

Nick