Brocade has announced the availability of a new family of fabric-based encryption platforms that helps customers meet their security and corporate governance objectives by encrypting critical corporate data with high performance and centralised management. These solutions offer an innovative approach to fabric-wide encryption for data-at-rest within the data centre.

The new solutions provide customers with a choice to fit their stored data encryption space requirements: Either the standalone Brocade Encryption Switch or the Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade for the Brocade DCX Backbone chassis. Both options provide up to 96 Gbit/sec of encryption processing power and scale quickly to meet rising customer data security demands.

Designed to protect existing data centre investments, the Brocade encryption platform architecture offers integration with several key management products for enterprise-wide key management and data centre encryption, including NetApp Lifetime Key Management and RSA Key Manager for the Datacentre.

Brocade is also collaborating with other industry players to support these encryption and key management solutions, including planned support for HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager.

Future-Proofing Investments within the Brocade Data Centre Fabric Architecture

The Brocade Encryption Switch is a high-performance, 32-port, auto-sensing 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel switch with high-speed encryption capabilities. The Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade provides the same plug-in storage security services in a 16-port blade. For easier customer deployment with lower risk, Brocade data encryption and management solutions can be implemented without disruption into the fabric and applied to specified data flows. Both platforms preserve existing and new storage investments by supporting a heterogeneous mix of networked storage systems and providing future support for virtual tape libraries and tape drives.