IBM ships tape with hardware crypto
PrintFirst to market, but a pricey solution to lost tapes
Posted in Storage, 14th September 2006 10:18 GMT
Free whitepaper – Reliability analysis of the APC Symmetra MW Power System
IBM has built public key encryption into its TS1120 tape drive, allowing the 500GB drive to encrypt and decrypt data on the fly in hardware.
The TS1120 isn't cheap, at almost £19,000 a pop, but could be worth it if you're worried about your tapes falling off a lorry - plus it should be faster than encrypting in software on the server. Tape encryption keys are managed centrally, either by Tivoli Storage Manager or a separate IBM key management application.
Older TS1120 drives can be upgraded to add encryption - that's not free though, as it involves new hardware and microcode. The TS1120 can be used with assorted IBM mainframes and servers, as well as with Windows, Unix and Linux systems, and it can be shared via a SAN.
IBM claims it is "the first fully encrypting drive" but it's not the only solution to the problem - companies such as SpectraLogic have built encryption into tape libraries, while the likes of Decru (now owned by NetApp) and Neoscale offer appliances that encrypt data before it is written to tape.
Encryption is also part of the LTO-4 spec - LTO-4 drives are due later this year.®
Free whitepaper – Fundamental Principles of Generators for Information Technology
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Seven ways to optimize VMware server virtualization
Dell PowerEdge R710 solution with VMware ESX vs. Dell PowerEdge 2850 solution
Enabling The Agile Data Center
OpenOffice.org pushes gamers' buttons with OOMouse
Windows 7 kills two thirds of active Vista initiatives
Big Iron, big data, big networks, big problems
HP scores SMB storage hat-trick