Storage Drive Encryption Featured at Shows

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Cisco, EMC, IBM, Seagate, and LSI are talking up disk drive encryption for data center storage this week, but they're not necessarily on the same page.

IBM was first to reveal plans Tuesday at SNW to deploy the same kind of encryption integral to its TS1120 tape library on its DS series disk arrays.

IBM's plan is based on its relationship with Seagate, which unveiled its Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive at the RSA show in San Francisco on Monday, as IBM was talking things up in Orlando. Seagate first unveiled FDE for laptops last summer.

Seagate plans to ship the new FDE drive this summer. If it does, it will be among the first major drive vendors to offer an encrypted drive for data center applications. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has encrypted drives for notebooks, but doesn't presently offer them for data center gear.

LSI got into the act yesterday with a suite-based press interview at SNW, during which Claudine Simson, LSI's CTO, vowed that LSI would continue to support Seagate's drive-level encryption in the future, principally by supporting Seagate drives in the arrays IBM OEM's from LSI. These arrays include the IBM DS3000 series of lower-end enterprise systems and IBM's DS4000 midrange SANs.Besides supporting standard AES 128 encryption in the Seagate-based systems, LSI plans to create silicon used in the encryption infrastructure that also performs content processing and analytics, according to Simson. "We will use enabling silicon to make sure keys are properly managed," she said.

Separately, EMC announced the EMC PowerPath Encryption with RSA, an integration of RSA's key management capabilities into the PowerPath multipathing technology used in EMC SANs. The package will manage encrypted keys for Symmetrix and Clariion systems, as well as for other storage gear linked to them. (EMC says it supports key management from a range of vendors, including IBM, via the RSA software.)

EMC also was part of a broader announcement with Cisco regarding data protection and security, which was made at RSA. The focus on the announcement was RSA's recently announced DLP Suite, which offers deep packet inspection of data to help identify information that might be sensitive to the enterprise.

This week's announcements show that key suppliers are intent on delivering encryption for storage managers, who are struggling not only with the performance hits encryption takes on their systems and networks, but also on the multiple encryption keys generated by systems and software.

At the same time, the news shows that the vendors continue to work separately toward better solutions.Seagate, LSI, and IBM think that putting encryption locally into drive chips solves any performance problems, and they see this as the approach to solve key management woes as well. The vendors are working in the IEEE to standardize a uniform format for key management via the P1619.3 working group, although that work seems to be happening in the background, secondary to their main focus on productizing disk-based encryption.

EMC has participated in IEEE P1619.3, but spokespeople could not identify ongoing efforts at press time. EMC spokespeople position PowerPath Encryption for RSA as a product that competes with IBM's projected offering but is presently available. Clearly, EMC sees its efforts as distinct from those of IBM and its partners.

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