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Tape Encryption Devices: Host-based vs. Appliance: Page 9 of 13

We placed NeoScale's shiny red CryptoStor Tape 704 between our storage data and our Hewlett-Packard Ultegra tape drives, encrypting all data that passed in from our storage network via Fibre Channel and sending it out over a second FC line to our tape storage system (see the diagram, below left). A NeoScale installation technician helped with setup; this is standard with any purchase, but installation was easy enough that we could have handled it ourselves.

The appliance would work the same with arbitrated loop implementations, where the storage network operates with many FC devices on a single segment or loop, but each data path must have a separate appliance intercepting traffic. Multiple CryptoStor appliances on the storage network operate as a cluster. So far so good, but as of this writing, the maximum number of appliances that can cluster is six, possibly not enough for large data centers operating complex SAN implementations with many tape libraries. NeoScale told us it plans to raise the number of devices in a cluster to 16 soon, maybe even by the time you read this.