News

posted on 22 May 2008 16:00

Brocade and EMC have announced a deal whereby Brocade's develping fabric encryption technology will interoperate with EMC
RSA's Key Manager for Datacenters.

Brocade's DCF - Data Centre Fabric - concept is based on converging server Lan traffic, Ethernet storage traffic (iSCSI) and Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) traffic onto Ethernet with a converged network DCX (Data Centre Switch) product
co-ordinating it all.

Brocade is developing encryption technology for the DCX. It will now interoperate with the RSA key management product so
that fabric encryption is integrated with an enterprise's overall encryption processes. The Brocade technology is designed
to run significantly faster than many of today's products, allowing backup applications to perform at full speed without being slowed by the host server running encryption code and thus slowing application or user performance.

Moreover, the heterogeneous nature of fabric-based encryption will allow a single encryption product to work with backup and storage solutions from different vendors.

EMC currently has an OEM relationship with Brocade for its SAN switches and directors and offers them as part of its EMC
Connectrix family.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Jon Oltsik said: "Today, administrators may manage different encryption for tape,
appliances, applications, disk and more. Fabric-based encryption allows for a single, common method of encrypting of all types of data. Fabric-based encryption can also help users overcome performance issues associated with other approaches to data encryption and reduce the risk that some storage-resident data may be left exposed."

Brocade's DCF encryption technology will need to interoperate with all main encryption key management products to gain wide
acceptance. Likewise the RSA key management product will need to interoperate with other encryption products to ensure its wide
acceptance.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}