TS1120 Tape Encryption - Customer Experiences

Jonathan Barney had implemented many deployments of tape encryption, and shared hisexperiences at two customer locations.

• The first company had decided to implement their EKM servers on dedicated 64-bitWindows servers. They had three sites, one in Chicago, Alphareta, and New York City,each with two EKM servers. Each library had a single TS3500 tape library, and pointedto four EKM servers, two local, and two remote.

  The clever trick was managing the keystore. They decided that EKM-1 was their trustedsource, made all changes to that, and then copied it to the other five EKM servers.His team deployed one site at a time, which turned out to be ok, but he would notrecommend it. Better to design your complete solution, and make sure that all librariescan access all EKM servers.

  This company decided to have a single key-label/key-pair for all three locations, but change it every 6 months. You have to keep the old keys for as long as you have tapesencrypted with those keys, perhaps 10-20 years.The customer found the IBM encryption implementation "elegant" and it can be easily replicated to a fourth site if needed.

• The second company had both z/OS and Sun Solaris. Initially they planned to have botha hardware-based keystore on System z, and software-based keystore on Sun, but they realized that System z version was so much more secure and reliable, that it made nosense to have anything on the Sun Solaris platform.

  On System z, they had two EKM images, and used VIPA to ensure load balancing fromthe library. Tapes written from z/OS used DFSMS Data Class to determine which tapesare encrypted and which aren't. All Tapes written from Sun Solaris were encryptied, written to a separate logical library partition of the TS3500, which in turn contactedthe System z for the EKM management to provide the keys to use for the encryption.

  The "gotcha" for this case was that when they tested Disaster Recovery, they had torecover the two EKM servers first, before any other restores could take place, and thistook way too long. Instead, they developed a scaled-down 10-volume "rescue recovery" z/OS image that would contain the RACF database and all EKM related software to actas the keystore during a disaster recovery. Anytime they make updates, they only haveto dump 10 volumes to tape. Restore time is down to only 2 hours.

He gave this advice to deploy tape encryption:

• Some third party z/OS security products, like Computer Associates Top Secret orACF2, require some PTFs to work with the EKM. The latest IBM RACF is good to go.
• Getting IP support from IOS to OMVS requires IPL.
• At one customer, an OMVS monitor software program killed the EKM because it wasn'tin their list of "acceptable Java programs". They updated the list and EKM ran fine.
• DO not update EKM properties file while EKM is running. EKM keeps a lot of stuffin memory, and when it is recycled, copies this back to the EKM properties file, reversing any changes you may have done. It is best to shut down EKM, update theproperties file, then start up EKM back up again. This is why you should always haveat least two EKM servers for redundancy.

TSM for Linux on System z

Randy Larson from our Tivoli group presented this session.There is a lot of interest in deploying IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup and archivesoftware on Linux for System z. Many customers are already invested in a mainframeinfrastructure, may have TSM for z/OS or z/VM, and want the newer features and functions that are available for TSM on Linux.

TSM has special support for Lotus Domino, Oracle, DB2 and WebSphere Application Servers.TSM clients can send backup data to a TSM server internally via Hipersockets, a virtualLAN feature on the System z platform that uses shared memory to emulate TCP/IP stack.

One of the big questions is whether to run Linux as guests under z/VM, or natively onLPAR. The general deployment is to carve an LPAR and run Linux natively untilyour server and storage administration staff have taken z/VM training classes. Oncetrained, they can easily move native LPAR images to z/VM guests. Unlike VMware that takesa hefty 40% overhead on x86 platforms to manage guests, z/VM only takes 5-10% overhead.

For the TSM database and disk storage pools, Randy recommends FC/SCSI disk, with ext3 file system, combined with LVM2 into logical volumes. ECKD disk and reiserfsworks too. Avoid use of z/VM minidisks. Under LVM2, consider 32KB stripes for the TSM database, and 256KB stripes for the disk storage pools. For multipathing, usefailover rather than multibus method. Read IC45459 before you activate "directio".

The TSM for Linux on z is very much like the TSM on AIX or Windows, and not like theTSM for z/OS. For tape, TSM for Linux on z does not support ESCON/FICON attached tape,you need to use FC/SCSI attached tape and tape libraries. TSM owns the library anddrives it uses, so give it a logical library partition separate from z/OS. ForSun/StorageTek customers, TSM works with or without the Gersham Enterprise Distrbu-Tape(EDT) software. Use the IBM-provided drivers for IBM tape. For non-IBM tape, TSM providessome drivers that you can use instead.

That wraps up my week. This was a great conference! If you missed it, look for the one in Montpelier, France this October. Check out the list of IBM Technical Conferencesto find others that might interest you.

technorati tags: IBM, Storage, Networking, Symposium, tape, encryption, EKM, keystore, z/OS, Solaris, ECKD, TSM, AIX, TS1120, Montpelier