I've got a review coming out next week or the following.
I spoke with the Litespeed people at PASS and they mentioned that they had worked with MS and taken advantage of new APIs in SS2K that run faster than the pipe mechanisms. Most agents and the native backup use the pipe mechanism.
Litespeed runs faster than native, slghtly higher CPU, but since I usually backup at off peak, it isn't a big deal. I did some minor work with the encryption, short keys (15 char or so) and didn't seem to substantially increase the CPU or times. Restores required the pwd (as expected) and worked fine.
The key management of the passwords has me a little stymied right now and until we can come with a way to manage this, not sure what to do. This is a great product and I highly recommend it. I'm seeing 70-90% compression of backups. 1GB backup files going to 120MB on compression level 2. Compression 3 (highest), really jumped the CPU. Not sure it matters, but 2 is a nice balance for me.
Steve Jones