Internode Communication and Encryption

The communication between the server nodes uses two distinct channels:

Internode SSL allows you to use SSL to secure communication between nodes within a cluster. It is important to secure communications between nodes if you do not trust the network between the nodes.

Admintools generates or retrieves the spread key to encrypt all traffic on the control channel and ships the spread key to all nodes. Vertica uses TLS to encrypt all traffic on the data channel. TLS credentials are shared between nodes over the encrypted control channel.

The following graphic illustrates how these internode encryption steps work.

If you enable internode encryption, some of your queries may run slower than expected. The performance you experience depends on the data sent over the network.