Brocade, a provider of data centre networking solutions, and NetApp, have announced a collaborative development effort that will enable data centre customers to more quickly and easily encrypt corporate data for increased security and compliance. The collaboration will also provide customers with simplified policy management and allow them to protect all data in the data centre.

Under the terms of the agreement, Brocade and NetApp will integrate the centrally-managed Lifetime Key Management solution from NetApp with Brocade's fabric-based encryption technology.  As a result, Brocade will resell the NetApp Lifetime Key Management appliance as part of its fabric-based encryption switches and blades portfolio.

Products and technology that enable advanced data encryption and security are important elements of the Brocade Data Centre Fabric (DCF) architecture, an open framework that helps customers enhance their data centre infrastructures for security, performance, flexibility, and investment protection.

Brocade is currently developing an encryption and compression capability that will leverage the NetApp OpenKey API, an open interface that allows third-party security applications to integrate with NetApp's secure key management framework. This will provide a common tool for easier policy management across encryption technologies.

The collaboration between Brocade and NetApp presents a new approach to encryption of data at rest –making it feasible to protect all data in the data centre.

The new approach will be significantly faster than existing solutions, as it will be based on Brocade's 8Gbit/sec DCF architecture. Additionally, the heterogeneous nature of Brocade fabric-based encryption will allow customers to support multiple data backup and data storage solutions concurrently.

"As the cost and risk of exposing sensitive information continue to rise, organisations must broaden their data encryption capabilities across their data centres," said Ian Whiting, vice president and general manager of the Brocade Data Centre Infrastructure Division. "Brocade recognises that scalable, tightly-integrated key management is an essential component of an enterprise-class data encryption solution. That’s why we are partnering with industry leaders in storage security, such as NetApp."

"NetApp is committed to multiplatform options for data encryption and to simplifying the management infrastructure for keys," said Tim Russell, vice president and general manager of Storage Security Solutions at NetApp. "We believe in interoperability and extending our work with Brocade demonstrates our commitment to this concept."