NWC News Network, July 7 2008, 1100 hrs
Brocade, data center networking solutions provider, and NetApp announced a collaborative development effort that will enable data center customers to more quickly and easily encrypt corporate data for increased security and compliance. The collaboration will also provide customers with simplified policy management and allow them to protect all data in the data center.
Under terms of the agreement, the two companies will integrate the secure, scalable, and 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.
Products and technology that enable advanced data encryption and security are important elements of the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture, an open framework that helps customers enhance their data center infrastructures for maximum security, performance, flexibility, and investment protection.
The networking solution provider is currently developing an innovative, high-performance encryption and compression capability that will leverage the NetApp OpenKey API, an open interface that allows third-party 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 will 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.
The new approach will be significantly faster than the available solutions, as it will be based on Brocade’s 8Gbit/sec DCF architecture. For applications requiring data encryption, the Brocade fabric-based solution will enable applications to perform at full wire speed, and protect significantly more data in less time without compromising application or user performance. Additionally, the heterogeneous nature of the encryption technology allows customers to support multiple data backup and data storage solutions concurrently.
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