Hardware Encryption for Tape Backup

Question

Hello Networker Community! I am running Networker 8.1 on Server 2008 R2. I am new to Networker. I come from a Backup Exec environment. In Backup Exec, I was able to create a policy to send a monthly Full backup to disk, followed immediately by a job sending that Full backup to Tape. When the data was written to Tape, it was hardware encrypted with a 256 bit encryption key housed on the server. The only reason we write to Tape is for our mandatory 10 year retention policy. I am looking to do the same thing in Networker. So far I haven't found an automated way to do the backup portion, so every month I select the checkbox on a Group to do a Clone and then I send that clone to Tape. This all works great, even though it's a manual process. But what I haven't been able to do yet is setup the hardware encryption process. Even if I had to do software encryption, that would be fine with me. But I only want the data written to Tape to be encrypted (the clone), not the data that's first written to disk. I have read a lot of documentation on how I can setup a password on the client side, but I don't want all the backups to be encrypted, only the clones to Tape. When reading about hardware encryption, I read that I might have to use third party software. Any chance someone can lead me through setting up my Backup Exec scenario on Networker? Thank you!!!

ble1 · Answer

If using hardware encryption, you use device which seats in front of your tape drive and does encryption.   Key management is done by 3rd party software and process happens outside backup application.  You can configure clone job to run based on preferences and direct it to offsite pool which will have longer retention applied (you can apply that at pool level).

Mike40001 · Answer

Thank you for your response. I have LTO Ultrium 6 Tape drives and, unless I'm mistaken, I believe these handle the hardware encryption piece. But as you said, I still need a key management application. It seems like Backup Exec used to be this for me. Does anyone know of any good 3rd party key management apps that work well?

ble1 · Answer

Yes, starting as of Gen4 they handle encryption (see Ultrium - LTO Technology - About LTO - FAQs). As for software, I do not have experience with those so someone else who uses this will have to jump in.

NetWorker

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