Secure Efficient Storage - overview
Compute environments are evolving in two directions: 1) to lower cost of storing primary as well as secondary data by leveraging data reduction techniques such as deduplication and compression, and 2) to improve data security by encrypting data close to the source/consumer of the data.
Interest in both of these techniques is accelerating due to the increasing availability of cores and MIPS along with hardware acceleration in standard processors.
However, encrypting data close to the source often defeats attempts by downstream data path components to reduce the size of the data, which can lead to problems in minimizing costs to store data as well as WAN bandwidth costs to store and access data during cloud, backup or disaster recovery use cases.
Requirements for both of these capabilities is growing to support cloud environments and other heavily virtualized environments, along with regulated environments such as health care and financial.
The goal of this project is to determine how these two technologies can learn to get along better in the storage stack, giving clients both cost savings and data confidentiality that are becoming increasingly urgent requirements.