Performance Improvement of an Iscsi-based Secure Storage Access

iSCSI protocol, used in building IP-based storage networks, is becoming more important because it realizes consolidation of storage at low cost, since security is a critical issue for the iSCSI protocol, on which remote storage is accessed over the IP networks. iSCSI can employ IPsec, which offers strong encryption. However, IPsec encryption processing degrades the performance of storage access and increases the CPU load of the server. In this paper, for realizing secure storage access efficiently on iSCSI networks, we propose the idea of an encryption scheme in the higher-level layer instead of an IPsec encryption scheme. We measured the performance on simple socket communication and on iSCSI communication using the proposed model, and compared our proposed scheme with IPsec. Consequently, our proposed method of encryption in the higher-level layer outperforms that of encryption using IPsec.