Re: Security Gateways

[Brian Pawlowski <beepy@netapp.com>]

> 2)  Concerning market requirements:
> 
> A very high percentage of storage environments today manage
> their configurations very carefully.  Such careful management is
> necessary to guarantee redundant paths for proper availability,
> to provide sufficient paths to provide the required performance, and to
> guarantee known paths to improve reparability and consistency
> of behavior.  As a side effect, a very high percentage of
> the paths of a storage environment are physically secured and have
> no requirement for additional security mechanisms.  

I've often mused that storage environments today based on FC are
physically secure as an artifact of the severe deployment restrictions
that the technology itself supports.

Replacing FC deployments with TCP/IP-based networks blows these
assumptions.

After years in the insecure wilderness within NFS, and the inability
to count on strong security from all vendors removing a motivation
to even invest in it (it was optional), the movement in NFS Version 4
to strong security was a key component of the evolution wrought since
it was handed to the IETF.

I look back on our lack of commitment to providing interoperable,
manadatory to implement (optional to enable) strong security as being
one of the greatest failures in NFS - that is finally being corrected.

It is certainly sobering when your PC on your desktop provides stronger
security guarantees in a simple network when it accesses data on some
server (CIFS) than you are guaranteed (through mandatory to implement)
in your enterprise class storage network. 

beepy