Case Study

Threats and Opportunities

Cloud-based computing provides a new and dynamic environment that offers users the

flexibility and freedom to store, share and access data anywhere. At the same time, cloud

computing is a new and evolving technology that can present service providers with

unforeseen challenges, particularly around data security and transparency.

The challenges of protecting data in the cloud is why the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)

was formed with the stated goal to “provide a threat identification deliverable that can be

quickly updated to reflect the dynamics of cloud computing and its rapidly evolving threat

environment.”

Leading the cloud data security charge is Vault Ecommerce. Known for its expertise and

visionary approach to providing information security and fraud management solutions

that uniquely bridge an entity’s business assets, Vault Ecommerce has pioneered many

breakthroughs in the managed security industry. As a result, its products are utilized by

leading global organizations with regulatory requirements and data protection needs.

Vault Security Intel

Vault Ecommerce’s exclusive Security Event and Information Management (SEIM) product,

Vault Security Intel, provides secure data collection and management of IT, privacy and

business systems, correlating a massive amount of data while maintaining near real-time

visibility and management. In addition, the Vault Security Intel platform gathers emerging

threats and fraud intelligence, including geographic and industry best practices and

responses. Vault Ecommerce can process as many as 4.2 million events each day, per customer.

To manage this volume of data, a complete solution, including a hardware platform with high

performance storage, is needed.

The ChallengeVault Ecommerce was launching Vault Security Intel, its next-generation cloud data security solution. They needed to incorporate an I/O device that would allow them to securely store large volumes of data, to provide fast access to commonly accessed data and that would allow them to support their customers either on a single in-house server or distributed across their cloud.

At the same time, they were also offering a flexible security appliance to provide secure data collection and high performance data interpretation back to one of their security operations centers.

The SolutionThey standardized on a platform using a combination of SATA HDDs for high capacity storage and SSDs for fast ac-cess and to cache collected data. The storage is powered by LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260CV-8i controllers running Ca-cheCade Pro 2.0 software for applica-tion acceleration.

The Result The performance of the LSI Enterprise RAID cards and software allows Vault Ecommerce to demonstrate what they believe to be best in class capabili-ties in security visibility and analysis, while reducing development costs and increasing flexibility of deployment.

Identity Theft. Credit Card Fraud. Hackers. Terrorists. It’s scary out there.LSI and Vault Ecommerce combine to enable next-generation cloud security solutions.

Recognized as an innovator and leader in cloud security and fraud management, Vault Ecommerce’s Derek Mezack is working with the CSA to set the standards for security in the cloud.

“To compete in today’s economy, companies face the challenge of finding a way to leverage

cost-saving technologies like the cloud and virtualization, while simultaneously providing

transparency in addressing both compliance requirements and industry threats from outside

and within,” said Vault Ecommerce’s Derek Mezack, “The Vault Security Intel platform is the

first to prepare organizations to meet this challenge with multi-tenant, transparency, and

portability security features that dramatically reduce the cost of ownership for any solution

meeting this challenge.”

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Why LSI

When it became time to launch its next-generation platform, Vault Ecommerce needed to

standardize on an I/O solution that could meet its unique performance requirements on both

the server and the client side. It also had a need to reduce development and implementation

costs.

“By having both client side and server side components leverage the same MegaRAID®

controller cards and MegaRAID CacheCade® software from LSI, we have dramatically reduced

development costs and the implementation details that are required to allow this kind of

flexibility in deployment.” said Mezack

Vault Ecommerce looked at other I/O solutions before finally selecting the LSI MegaRAID SAS

9260CV-8i controller running CacheCade Pro 2.0 software for application acceleration.

“For our managed services, we can utilize these cards to achieve what my tests have shown to

be an enormous performance benefit to the data processing of our collection appliance. The

card is able to meet, and in many cases even beat, dramatically more expensive I/O solutions.”

said Mezack.

When providing managed security service solutions to the SEIM market there is a massive

amount of data that needs to be stored and processed. Most SEIM solutions look at up to three

different types of data, which may include firewall, IDS, and anti-virus data. With typical SEIM

solutions it is not uncommon to have individual clients creating hundreds of thousands of

records, every day.

Vault Ecommerce’s SEIM solution is different though. Their next generation software looks at

as many as 12 different types of data which generates a corresponding increase in the amount

of data to be sorted and stored. “By leveraging a company’s asset, privacy, and critical business

applications our clients drive more effective security decisions to enable their business.”

The LSI Enterprise RAID controller selected by Vault Ecommerce gives them the ability to

access the capacity that they need while at the same time, delivering on performance as well.

“The LSI controller gives us the ability to tie multiple storage devices together as one, which

solves our capacity issue,” said Vault Ecommerce’s John Holt, “The data that is used most comes

to the front for quick access, which is critical to what we do.”

“For our managed services, we can utilize these cards to achieve what my tests have shown to be an enormous performance benefit to the data processing of our collection appliance. The card is able to meet, and in many cases even beat, dramatically more expensive I/O solutions.” Derek MezackVault Ecommerce

MegaRAID SAS 9260CV-8i with CacheVault Flash Module, Power Module and remote cable

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“We are one of the only companies that addresses industry specific threats, fraud, and misuse

in a single solution.” according to Holt. “We compare the activity data we’ve collected against

more than 90,000 known threat signatures. We also compare the data to our multi-industry

knowledge base of over 1.3 million threat and fraud characteristics to ensure detection of

any possible attack. This comprehensive approach to threat identification allows us to more

accurately alert the customer to bona fide attacks and minimize inundating them with false

positives which tend to desensitize security responders.”

Scaling with MegaRAID Controllers

To do this effectively, Vault Ecommerce needed to populate its data center with storage

systems that could handle the volumes of data that they deal with. For example, for a single

customer, they monitor a proprietary credit processing application that handles 1.5 million

credit transactions every day. To get the right combination of performance and capacity, they

chose MegaRAID SAS 9260CV-8i controllers. These controllers allowed them to meet their

storage needs by building high capacity arrays using SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) and to meet

their performance requirements by using Solid State Drives (SSDs) for cache.

When dealing with security threats, speed is critical. The faster a threat is identified and dealt

with, the less damage it can do. To get the fastest possible performance Vault Ecommerce

decided to use SSDs with the CacheCade Pro 2.0 software.

CacheCade Pro 2.0

CacheCade Pro 2.0 software allows SSDs to act as a dedicated pool of high-performance cache

between HDDs and the LSI controllers. This software intelligently places highly-accessed data

or “hot data” in high-performance SSDs, which minimized HDD-only writes/reads and leads to

reduced HDD latency. This can result in significantly improved overall storage system reliability.

“We conduct security searches on things such as security signatures at the client site, in real

time, so that we can catch any threats before they become a problem. Then data is compressed

and encrypted with a 256-bit encryption algorithm and sent to our offices for a detailed scan.

When this customer data comes in, performance becomes critical for us so we use the write-

back cache feature” said Mezack, “but we were concerned because we have had issues with

cache battery backups before. That’s why we were excited about the CacheVault™ technology.”

CacheCade Pro 2.0 Cache Pool

Mirror

HotData

ColdData

CacheCade Pro 2.0 software intelligently copies hot data to low latency, redundant SSD cache.

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Vault Ecommerce chose MegaRAID controllers that feature onboard CacheVault technology.

This technology offloads data stored in the MegaRAID controller cache to the NAND flash in

the event of a power failure or other system occurrence where the contents of controller cache

are most at risk. In addition, CacheVault technology eliminates the need for lithium ion (Li-ion)

batteries, traditionally used to protect DRAM cache memory on PCI RAID controllers. Therefore,

not only do they benefit from the higher performance, scalability and configuration flexibility

offered by the 6Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS controllers, but they also take advantage of a

greener, lower total cost cache protection solution.

All around the world tonight CIOs, Chief Compliance Officers and end users can sleep easier

knowing their valuable digital assets and information are safer, thanks in part to Vault

Ecommerce and LSI.

Benefits

LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0 Software

• OutstandingPerformancebyUsingSSDsfor“Hot”DatainVariousApplications

• ReducedPowerandFootprintRequirementsinDatacenters

• Dramaticimprovementinapplicationperformance,includingMicrosoftExchange,

transactional databases and web servers, and hypervisors

LSI MegaRAID SAS 6Gb/s 9260CV-8i Controller

• Superiorperformance

• PCIExpress®2.0providesfastersignalingforhigh-bandwidthapplications

• Supportfor3Gb/sand6Gb/sSATAandSASharddrivesandSSDsformaximuminside-the-

box flexibility

• SupportforLSIAdvancedSoftwareOptionsincludingMegaRAIDFastPath,CacheCade,

SafeStore™ and Recovery software

• Low-profileMD2formfactorforspace-limited1Uand2Uenvironments

Product Overview - LSI

Built on the industry-leading 6Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS controllers, the MegaRAID CV series

features the 800MHz LSISAS2108 RAID-on-Chip (ROC), 512MB DDRII cache memory, and a x8

PCI Express 2.0 host bus interface. In addition to the performance, scalability and configuration

flexibility offered by the 6Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS controllers, customers will benefit from a

greener, lower cost cache protection solution with MegaRAID CacheVault technology.

Today’s workload-intensive business applications are often constrained by the perfor¬mance

limitations of their existing HDDs. With this type of storage infrastructure already in place,

it can be cost prohibitive to switch to a new array based purely on SSDs. Although they

are capable of many more transactions per second than HDDs, SSDs have a very high cost

per gigabyte and are not suited for heavy, large file workloads. The key to accelerating the

performance of existing HDD arrays without making substantial investments in new hardware

is to deploy CacheCade software, which uses SSDs in front of HDD volumes to create high-

capacity, high-performance controller cache pools.

“The LSI RAID card gives us the ability to tie multiple storage devices together as one, which solves our capacity issue. The data that is used most comes to the front for quick access, which is critical to what we do.”” John HoltVault Ecommerce

For more information and sales office locations, please visit the LSI web sites at: lsi.com lsi.com/channel

LSI Corporation, the LSI logo design, MegaRAID, CacheCade, CacheVault and SafeStore are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation. All other brand and product names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

LSI Corporation reserves the right to make changes to any products and services herein at any time without notice. LSI does not assume any responsibility or liability arising out of the application or use of any product or service described herein, except as expressly agreed to in writing by LSI; nor does the purchase, lease, or use of a product or service from LSI convey a license under any patent rights, copyrights, trademark rights, or any other of the intellectual property rights of LSI or of third parties.

Copyright ©2012 by LSI Corporation. All rights reserved. > 0312

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Case Study

About Vault Ecommerce

Vault Ecommerce is recognized for its expertise and visionary approach to providing an

information security and fraud management solution that uniquely bridges an entity’s

business assets. Our team has pioneered many of the managed security industry’s

breakthroughs, utilized by leading global organizations with regulatory requirements and data

protection needs. For more information visit www.vaultecommerce.com.

Build Today

You can use the same LSI RAID technology as Vault Ecommerce for your high performance

requirements today. Contact David Graas at david.graas@lsi.com for more information.