I've ran into a problem and I'm looking for a new secure protocol/client/server that's faster over a 1Gb/s fibre link - let me tell you the story...
I have a pair of redundant, diversely-routed, 1Gb/s links over a distance of around 250 miles or so (not dark fibre but a dedicated point to point link, not a mesh).
At the 'client' end I have a HP DL380 G5 (2 x dual-core 2.66Ghz Xeon's, 4GB, Windows 2003EE 32-bit), at the 'server' end I have a HP BL460c G6 (2 x quad-core 2.53Ghz Xeons, 48GB, Oracle Linux 5.3 64-bit).
I need to transfer around 500 x 2GB files per week from the client to the server machines per week - but the transfer NEEDS to be secure.
Using both iPerf or regular FTP I can get ~80MB/s of transfer pretty consistently, which is great.
Using WinSCP or Windows SFTP I can't seem to get more that ~3-4MB/s, at this point the server's CPU is 3% busy while CPU0 of the client goes to ~30% utilised. We've tried editing various TCP window sizes with little success.
Both ends are connected to quite low-usage Cisco Cat6509's with Sup720's.
I can replace the client machine with a newer machine and/or move it to Linux - but this will take time.
Clearly these single-threaded secure Windows clients are introducing too much latency doing their encryption.
So a few questions/thoughts;
Are there any higher performing secure protocols or client software for Windows that I could try? I'm pretty protocol-gnostic so long as it'll work between Windows and Linux.
Should I be using hardware to do the encryption, either in the client or the network parts? If so what would you recommend?
I'm not convinced that just swapping the server would be that much faster, the CPU was only at 30% but then again that's higher than I'd have expected given the load - moving to Linux at the client end may be a better idea but would be quite disruptive.
Am I missing a trick?
Thanks in advance.
