Friday, 27 June 2008

Brocade & NetApp Collaborate, Extend Data Encryption

Brocade and NetApp today announced a collaborative development effort that will enable data center customers to more quickly and easily encrypt corporate data for increased security and compliance.

Under terms of the agreement, Brocade and NetApp will integrate the centrally managed Lifetime Key Management solution from NetApp with Brocade’s fabric based encryption technology. As a result, Brocade will resell the NetApp Lifetime Key Management appliance as part of its fabric-based encryption switches and blades portfolio.

Brocade said it is currently developing an innovative, high-performance encryption and compression capability that will leverage the NetApp OpenKey API, an open interface that allows thirdparty security applications to integrate with NetApp’s secure key management framework.

This provides a common tool for easier policy management across encryption technologies. NetApp already has a substantial list of Lifetime Key Management customers, which include some of the industry's largest storage encryption deployments by scale, and expects this to increase dramatically as its new encryption platforms are adopted.

The combined technologies aim to provide an easy-to-use, high-performance solution for increased protection of critical corporate information. Additionally, the collaboration presents a new approach to encryption of data at rest – a breakthrough in data protection – making it feasible to protect all data in the data center.

“With so many approaches to encryption receiving attention today, the complexity of encryption itself can pose a risk. Fabric-based encryption is one approach that can help reduce the complexity of storage encryption,” said Scott Crawford, research director, Enterprise Management Associates.

“Today, administrators may manage different encryption for tape, appliances, applications, disk, and more. Fabric-based encryption allows for a single, common method of encrypting all types of data. By centralizing encryption, fabric-based approaches can also centralize key management and reduce its complexity."