Seagate starts shipping self-encrypting enterprise HDDs

Hard Drives

Trying to keep the hard drive crown, Seagate has now begun to provide the Secure Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option for its enterprise line-up which includes the Savvio 15K.2, Savvio 10K.3, Constellation and Cheetah 15K.7 HDDs.

This move enables Seagate’s customers to choose from a wide variety of drives that offer automatic data-at-rest security for their servers and storage systems.

“Self-Encrypting Drives are one of the easiest, most cost-effective security measures companies can implement,” said Eric Ouellet, vice president at Gartner. “The use of SEDs provides businesses with complete data-at-rest protection against information breaches that can occur in drives and systems that have been repurposed, decommissioned, disposed of, sent for repair, misplaced or stolen. Because all disk media eventually leaves a company’s control, the use of SEDs ensures that data is protected at these critical stages of a system’s life cycle.”

According to Seagate, the benefits brought by its SED hard drives are:

- Performance - The encryption engine matches the full interface speed of the drive and therefore drive performance does not suffer. And because each individual drive contains its own encryption engine, there are no bandwidth issues with scalability as your security and storage needs grow with more drives added to the system.

- Compatibility - Drive-level full disk encryption (FDE) technology is supported by the security protocol developed through the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), an organization consisting of membership of more than 50 participating companies, including all hard drive manufacturers.

- Manageability - Transparent to end user and storage systems, SEDs scale linearly with no bottlenecks or single points of failure. The IT user does not need to escrow the encryption key to maintain data recoverability because the encryption key is held in the drive. This frees the storage administrator from having to schedule and conduct this performance-throttling activity.

- Security - SED technology delivers a new standard of security for data-at-rest encryption. Cipher text is never exposed and the drive is locked and inaccessible to anyone without full authorization.

For more info about Seagate’s SED solution see this page.

Tags: hard drive, hdd, seagate, self encrypting