Self-Encrypting Hard Drive for Server and RAID by Seagate

Seagate Technology
introduced a new breed of hard drive, the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full
Disk Encryption) disc drive family, the world’s first self-encrypting
hard drives for mission-critical servers and storage arrays.

As part of
the award-winning Cheetah family, the industry-standard in performance
and reliability in data centers, the new Cheetah 15K.6 FDE hard drive
now also encrypts data as well. And that encryption goes anywhere the
hard drive goes – whether it is moved, stored, or retired.

“The
data breaches widely reported in the media generally focus on stolen
laptops and PCs, but people forget about the staggering amount of
information leaving the data center daily,” said Sherman Black, senior
vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute
Business. “Equipment and systems with hard drives inside are
continuously being retired, relocated or repaired and there’s often
little thought given to properly disposing of the data they contain
before they leave the data center. A recent investigation showed that
50% of the drives returned for servicing by customers contained
readable sectors. If you assume that an average system’s lifecycle is
three to five years that suggests that more than 50 thousand enterprise
drives are leaving data centers daily worldwide. If only half of those
hard drives are readable, that’s at least 2,500TB per day of exposed
data available in the open market. The increasing flow of exposed
sensitive data ought to be a serious concern to CIO’s everywhere.”

Compared to other encryption technologies, self-encryption within the
hard drive brings significant performance, management, and security
benefits for users. Since the encryption engine is in the drive’s
controller ASIC, encryption is transparently fast and performance
automatically scales with every drive added to a data center. Because
there is no performance cost associated with encrypting more data,
there is no need to make fine-grained decisions as to what data to
protect – which can eliminate the need for data classification.
Self-encryption requires no change to the OS, applications, or
databases. Instantaneous Key-Erase™ technology, a standard on all
Seagate FDE hard drives, facilitates quick and secure removal, whether
for repurposing, returning for service, or disposal.

Leading
analysts, standards bodies, and major storage providers have closely
evaluated and concluded that self-encrypting drives deliver critical
benefits for data center information security.

Gartner:
“Many organizations are considering drive-level security for its
simplicity in helping secure sensitive data through the hardware
lifecycle from initial setup, to upgrade transitions and disposal,”
said Eric Ouellet, research vice president, Secure Business Enablement,
Gartner. “Hard drive disposal in particular has always been one of the
most challenging elements of the data security lifecycle. Even with
secure disposal processes in place, misplacement, mislabeling and theft
still do occur which can result in significant losses, possible
penalties and fines. Eliminating the risk of compromise from the source
is one approach that can significantly reduce the complexity of
managing sensitive data.”

IBM:
“Enterprise
customers today, especially in the financial services sector, have a
keen interest in protecting data-at-rest. Natively securing data in the
storage drive without any system performance degradation is the next
frontier in truly securing data and storage media that eventually
leaves the data center,” said Robert Cancilla, vice president of Disk
Systems, IBM. “Introduced over a year ago, IBM’s self encrypting tape
solutions, featuring key management software, continue to address this
security priority without the traditional impact to I/O performance,
while simplifying encryption key management. We’re excited about
working with Seagate to bring this model to our disk offerings.”

LSI:
“With the continued headlines about data breaches and emerging
government mandates, the need for data-at-rest encryption has come
front and center,” said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president,
Engenio Storage Group, LSI. “By encrypting at the drive level, users
can potentially eliminate application impact and reduce worry about
drives being lost, stolen or repurposed. LSI is pleased to be working
with other industry leaders to drive critical developments in
standards-based encryption technology.”

Trusted Computing Group:
“Full drive encryption enabled in hardware and based on the open
standards created by the Trusted Computing Group with Seagate’s
leadership can give administrators and users confidence that data will
be encrypted quickly, easily and always,” noted Brian Berger, Trusted
Computing Group marketing work group chair. “As demonstrated by the
rapidly increasing number of lost, stolen or hacked drives, encryption
in hardware really is the most effective solution to help ensure the
security of at-rest mission-critical information. Otherwise,
corporations potentially face millions or worse in government fines,
lost business, lost goodwill and undermining of other corporate
relationships.”

As a complementary solution for data
protection of non-encrypted drives that leave the data center, the
Seagate Recovery Services division recently announced its Data Erasure
suite of products that utilize a series of advanced, defense-industry
rated and approved algorithms to completely and permanently erase all
data from a disk drive to ensure that proprietary and sensitive
information does not get into the wrong hands.

Details about the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE Family of Hard Drives
Available in capacities of 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB, the Cheetah 15K.6
family includes Seagate PowerTrim technology which dynamically
optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. The
Cheetah 15K.6 FDE family offers the highest 3.5-inch hard drive
reliability in the industry at 1.6 million hours MTBF (0.55% AFR), a
choice of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces,
and a five-year limited warranty. The Cheetah 15K.6 FDE drive is
shipping to OEM suppliers this quarter.

Seagate Technology