I'm less that pleased with the impact that software encryption has had on
my NW V7.4 (Unix) operation.

Pre-software-encryption: I used to run my (count: 35) clients with
compression ENABLED and I was able to fit 24 hours of backups of my client
systems onto my 1TB of disk space. Clones for offsite backups were
reasonably quick onto my LTO3 drives coming directly from disk.

In order to enable the software encryption in NW, I had to *DISABLE* the
compression and *WOW* what an impact on my disk usage on the NW server! I
had to revert to having only my critical systems backup directly to disk,
all of the others now backup directly to tape. The main pain is that write
performance from these clients direct to tape suffers since it is no
longer buffered by the disk; I'm pretty sure that the data rate to the
tape drives is often below the rate needed to keep them streaming, thus
"shoeshining" (backhitching) is probably happening on the drives -
something I want to avoid.

I'd rather spend the $$ on hardware encryption instead of additional disk
space for my backups, which would mean purchase of the next tier of backup
license for NW. With hardware encryption I can re-enable compression and
will again have adequate disk space for all of my clients to backup to.

Does anyone have any comments or experience on the encryption appliances
that sit between the SCSI controller and the tape drives? (I have copper
LVD SCSI, BTW - no fiberchannel). How is the throughput?

It would appear that some of these appliances need an auxiliary server to
handle key management - I don't really want/need that for my tiny
operation.

Thanks!

Lee Roth

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