Ashvin Kamaraju | Vice President of Engineering, Strategy & Innovation
Today Vormetric is pleased to announce our support for the latest line of Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v2 family, further strengthening our partnership. Vormetric’s data security platform utilizes the new chip’s AES-NI encryption enhancements to significantly boost performance and lower encryption times.
Intel and Vormetric have established a strong partnership beginning with Vormetric Encryption software exploiting Intel’s new processor level instructions for accelerating computationally intensive encryption algorithms such as the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). These new instructions are collectively referred to as Intel Data Protection Technology with AES-NI. In our first project, back in 2012, Intel and Vormetric conducted a Transaction Processing over XML (TPoX) benchmark to test Vormetric encryption technology using the Intel Xeon processor E5 family with AES-NI. Results showed that implementing data encryption in a traditional relational database reduced peak transaction throughput by less than 4% compared with a similarly configured server that did not encrypt data. Many enterprise customers benefited by deploying Vormetric Data Security software on Intel platforms to protect their data and meeting regulatory requirements without having to trade off performance for security.
We are in the midst of exploding data growth both from traditional sources (transactional records) as well as from new sources such as social media, sensors and logs. Mining data from both sources to provide better, faster business intelligence has resulted in the explosive growth of Big Data platforms. High-speed data analytics is changing the way companies compete, enabling them to generate real-time insights to support their most important business processes. This trend, in turn, results in a need for processors optimized for high speed operations with transactions and data. And since these Big Data platforms also contain sensitive data that is subject to regulatory compliance, it is also driving the need for securing the data without affecting that performance.
The Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v2 family provides dramatic performance and scalability enhancements versus previous generation processors, including up to 2x faster performance for complex, ad hoc queries,a and up to 3 times the memory capacity per socket (up to 6 TB per 4-socket server and up to 12 TB per 8-socket server). The Intel Xeon family is ideal for in-memory computing, virtualization, cloud and big data environments and created to meet the needs of the most intensive computing environments. Intel Data Protection Technology with Secure Key, also known as Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG), introduced in these new generation processors, provides high-quality encryption keys using a hardware-based Random Number Generator (RNG). Secure Key generates truly random numbers based on unpredictable thermal fluctuations within the chip. The RNG is automatically detected and used by leading operating systems. It is completely transparent to applications and supports scalable key generation for demanding enterprise applications.
By supporting both AES-NI and Secure Key, the Vormetric Data Security increases encryption security while simultaneously reducing the performance impact on both applications and the supporting infrastructure. With customers concerned that any data storage overhead will impact Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for applications, Vormetric’s use of Intel hardware acceleration provides the critical capability to meet business requirements to encrypt data with minimal performance impact.
In memory speed tests using Vormetric Data Security demonstrated that this new processor family improves data encryption performance by up to 75%. These performance gains offer significant value in data and computationally intensive environments, enabling strong data encryption without significantly impacting the performance that is so critical in real-time business environments.
Needlessly to say, the mileage varies. There are a number of other factors such as the type of I/O access, storage characteristics, system tuning and the application workload will have an impact of the actual performance achieved in a production deployment but these tests are indicative of the performance gains that can be realized on this new generation of processors.
In closing, I am proud and happy to be partnering closely with Intel, leveraging the foundation of data protection technologies in our software and enabling our enterprise customers to confidently embrace new computing trends in Big Data, Analytics and Cloud Computing and comforted by the fact that they can protect & secure their data without trading off performance for security. I look forward to further strengthening our technology partnership through future innovation and continued collaboration.