Encrypting volumes that already exist.

[JohnSchafer]

Greetings all, 

We are running a Nimble SF300 at software level 4.4.1.0-514573-opt. When we did the inital installation we did not enable encryption.  Now we would like to enable encryption for all data at rest.  

Is it possible to enable encryption on an existing volume or will we have to create a new volulme in order to get the data encrypted?  We were told by our pre sales technical engineer that we could enable later and all new blocks writen to the volume would be encrypted so eventually over a period of time the entire volume will be encrypted. However I saw a statement in the users guide that it is not possible to turn on encryption for and existing volume.  Would like some clarification on that.   If the latter is true, what is the best way to get the data copied over to the new encrypted volume?  Thank you,  John 

[Nick_Dyer]

Hello John,

Sounds like the encryption & dedupe features have been mixed up in communication. It's not possible to enable/disable encryption on a volume once it's been created, and it's not possible to then post-process encrypt data that's already on the array - it's inline only. Dedupe, however, can be enabled/disabled on volumes once they've been created (but data still isn't post-processed).

The solution here is to use host tools to move your data from one volume to a new volume with encryption enabled. If you're using it as a Veeam backup target, then it's as simple as creating a new repository and migrating the Veeam backups through Veeam, or through Windows.