Seagate sweeps in self-encryption

All its enterprise drives clam up

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 23rd September 2009 11:39 GMT

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Seagate has extended its range of encrypting drives to cover all its enterprise products.

The Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option is now available across the Savvio 15K.2, Savvio 10K.3, Constellation and Cheetah 15K.7 product ranges. These drives should work with users' encryption infrastructures. Seagate says Intel and LSI are now shipping local key management and 6Gbit/s SAS products. These have TCG-based (Trusted Computing Group) security technology within their controllers and server products that integrate with its Seagate's SED disks.

TCG is an organisation with a membership of more than 50 participating companies, including all the hard drive manufacturers. It is working so that key management standards to insure interoperability are being established via the IEEE 1619.3 Key Management Standards group. All major storage system providers are participating in this group.

A drive's encryption engine matches the full interface speed of the drive and drive performance is not affected by data being encrypted/decrypted. The user does not need to escrow the encryption key to maintain data recoverability because the key is held in the drive. With SED the drive is locked and inaccessible to anyone without full authorisation.

Seagate assures VARs and system integrators that they can build secure systems with the SED disks that are strong "enough for national security, yet easy enough for the one-person IT department to manage". ®

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