Can Storage Fabrics Offer Security?

Tag : fabric tape

Storage News
September 24, 2008
Can Storage Fabrics Offer Security?
By Paul Shread

Security is becoming an increasingly important part of storagefabrics, based on recent announcements from Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD).
Encryption of Fibre Channel data in motion was a big part of Cisco's new switch lineup announced last week.
And Brocade followed this week with a plan for securing data atrest.
"Organizations need a broader deployment of encryption technologiesacross data centers in order to protect data confidentiality andprivacy," said Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Jon Oltsik."Specific to storage, these security and privacy demands require anarchitectural approach for enterprise-wide encryption ofdata-at-rest while enabling end-to-end management for the secureflow of data across multiple fabrics."
Cisco and Brocade have been racing to implement their vision ofconverged networks, combining LAN and SAN traffic — and now security too (see Brocade Takes on Cisco and Cisco, Brocade See One Big Happy Fabric ).
Brocade's encryption is delivered by either the standalone BrocadeEncryption Switch or the Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade for theBrocade DCX Backbone chassis. Both offer as much as 96 Gbit/sec ofencryption processing power.
The Brocade encryption platform has also been integrated with keymanagement products such as NetApp's (NASDAQ: NTAP) Lifetime KeyManagement and RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter from EMC's (NYSE:EMC) RSA security division. Brocade also plans to support HP's(NYSE: HPQ) StorageWorks Secure Key Manager .
The Brocade Encryption Switch is a 32-port, auto-sensing 8 Gbit/secFibre Channel switch with high-speed encryption capabilities. TheFS8-18 Encryption Blade provides the same plug-in storage securityservices in a 16-port blade.
Brocade says its data encryption and management solutions can beimplemented without disruption into the fabric and applied tospecified data flows. Both platforms support a heterogeneous mix ofnetworked storage systems and promise future support for virtualtape libraries ( VTLs ) and tape drives.
The encryption solutions are centrally managed and configured usingBrocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM), the company's end-to-enddata center fabric management application that was also refreshedthis week.
Brocade also boosted its services offerings to help customersdesign secure network architectures.
Back to Enterprise Storage Forum
Article courtesy of Enterprise Storage Forum .