Brocade and EMC/RSA Collaborate

Brocade and EMC Corporation announced a collaborative development effort that extends the scope of their longstanding relationship and will help enable data center customers to more quickly and reliably encrypt data for security and compliance purposes.

As part of this expanded alliance, the two companies plan to integrate technologies from RSA, The Security Division of EMC — including the RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter solution — with the planned fabric-based encryption technology that Brocade is currently developing. EMC and Brocade have worked together for many years to provide customers with the latest Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. EMC currently has an OEM relationship with Brocade for its SAN switches and directors and offers them as part of its EMC Connectrix family.

Together, the solutions from Brocade and EMC will help provide mutual customers with an easy-to-use, highly scalable way to reduce information risk and further simplify enterprise data security. The forthcoming encryption capability from Brocade will be an integral part of the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture and is designed to help IT organizations protect more data with less management time and resource. The technology is designed to run significantly faster than many of today’s solutions, allowing backup applications to perform at full speed and without compromise to application or user performance. Additionally, the heterogeneous nature of fabric-based encryption will allow a single encryption solution to work with backup and storage solutions from different vendors.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will work closely to allow this new encryption capability to interoperate with proven RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter technology. RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter is engineered as an easy-to-use, centrally administered encryption key management system that can manage encryption keys at the database, file server, and storage layer. It is designed to simplify the deployment and ongoing use of encryption throughout the enterprise and to help ensure that information is properly secured and fully accessible when needed at any point in its lifecycle.

"Fabric-based encryption can help reduce the complexity of storage encryption," said Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Jon Oltsik. "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."

Security is an important function of the Brocade DCF architecture, which is an open framework that allows customers to adapt to the dynamics of virtualized servers and storage, while accommodating expanding application workloads and the relentless growth of corporate data. By leveraging the performance and intelligence enabled by the Brocade DCF architecture along with industry-leading security solutions from EMC, customers will be able to effectively encrypt critical corporate information to more easily achieve their security and corporate governance objectives.

"Internal policy and external regulations continue to motivate our customers to develop and adopt a holistic encryption and enterprise key management strategy to secure their sensitive data," said Dennis Hoffman, Vice President and General Manager for Data Security and Chief Strategy Officer at RSA. "We are pleased to partner with Brocade to further meet our customers’ requirements for security solutions that are directly embedded into the infrastructure."

"Brocade recognizes that scalable, tightly integrated key management is an integral component of a solid enterprise-class data encryption solution," said Ian Whiting, Vice President and General Manager of the Brocade Data Center Infrastructure Division. "We believe that teaming with EMC and its RSA Security Division demonstrates our continued commitment to partnering with industry leaders to provide interoperable solutions that make customers’ environments more secure and manageable."