Performance Evaluation of iSCSI System Optimized for Encryption Processing in the Upper Layer

iSCSI protocol, used in building IP-based storage networks, is becoming more important because it realizes consolidation of storage at low cost. Security is a critical issue for the iSCSI protocol, on which remote storage is accessed over the IP networks. iSCSI can employ IPsec that offers a function of strong encryption. However, IPsec encryption processing degrades the performance of storage access and increases the CPU load of the server. In this paper, to perform secure storage access on iSCSI networks, we propose the storage access method of encrypting in the upper layer and its optimization, instead of using IPsec encryption that leads to the performance degradation. We implemented our proposed system, and experimentally evaluated our system accessed with multi process for simulating optimization of encryption pre-processing. As a result, our proposal, optimizing of encryption pre-processing is more efficient than the method using IPsec.