Hardware

The Data Diode Engine is delivered as a firmware and requires several devices for a complete system setup. This document outlines the required hardware specifications which ensure optimal performance and compatibility with a DD Engine. The setup can be customized to fit a specific use case but listed below are the common denominators. For support regarding more specific setups, please contact Advenica Customer Services.

Hardware components

The DD Engine requires the following hardware:

• 2 Host machines - to host the DD Engine firmware. One machine for Upstream and one for Downstream. For details, see Host machines.
• 2 Administrator devices - to act as a client for the administrative user interface (DD Manager). One device for Upstream and one for Downstream. For details, see Administrator devices.
• 1 Data Diode - to ensure secure, one-way data flow. One device placed between the two networks. For details, see Data Diode.

Host machines

The two host machines are the ones running the DD Engine firmware on the two different networks. An overview of the general requirements are presented in the table below, details are provided in the sub sections of this chapter.

Component	Minimum requirement
Physical network interfaces	3 (data, admin and diode)
Network interface speed	1Gbit/s
CPU architecture	Intel Haswell (Xeon v3, Core 4xxx) or later AMD Zen (Epyc, Ryzen 1xxx) or later
CPU cores	4
Memory	16GB
Hard drive capacity	250GB
MTU	9000B

info

The use case heavily influences performance requirements, and therefore the specifics in this document should mainly be regarded as guidelines.

Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)

By default, the Data Diode Engine is configured to use an MTU of 9000 when communicating over the data diode. If the network card of either of the host machines running Data Diode Engine does not support MTU values that high, the interface configuration must be manually updated to a supported value.

See Advanced Interface Configuration for more information on how to update the MTU configuration for a network interface.

Reference hardware

The use case and service configuration heavily influences the requirements affecting performance. In order to provide some guidelines, a reference hardware is presented in this section. When the DD Engine runs on host machines fulfilling the specification in the table below, good performance has been observed in a variety of service configurations and use cases. However, the reference hardware cannot be guaranteed to fit all system setups, it is provided to act as a guideline for the most most common use cases.

If you have any specific questions or considerations regarding performance, please contact Advenica Customer Services.

Component	Specification
Motherboard	Supermicro X13SCH-LN4F
CPU	Intel Xeon E-2456 3,3GHz 6 core
Memory	2x 16GB DDR5
Hard drive	400GB NVMe PCIe 4.0

Administrator devices

The administrator device is connected as a client to the DD Manager server which is a part of the DD Engine software. It is required that the device runs the latest version of one of the browsers listed below:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Edge

Data Diode

The Data Diode is fundamental for the DD Engine system setup since it is the part guaranteeing the one-way data transfer. Listed below are the Advenica data diodes which are compatible with the DD Engine:

• DD1000A
• DD1G