Managing operational risk by protecting valuable digital assets has become increasingly critical in today's enterprise IT environments. In addition to achieving compliance with regulatory mandates and meeting industry standards for data confidentiality, IT organizations must also protect against potential litigation and liability following a reported breach.

In the context of data center fabric security, Brocade provides advanced fabric services for Storage Area Networks (SANs) with the Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade for use in the Brocade DCX 8510 and Brocade DCX. The blade is a high-speed, highly reliable hardware device that delivers fabric-based encryption services to secure data assets either selectively or on a comprehensive basis.

The Brocade FS8-18 scales non-disruptively, providing up to 96 Gbps of encryption processing power to meet the needs of the most demanding environments with flexible, on-demand performance. It also provides compression services at speeds up to 48 Gbps for tape storage systems. Moreover, it is tightly integrated with industry-leading, enterprise-class key management systems that can scale to support key lifecycle services across distributed environments.

Fabric-Based Encryption

Most sensitive corporate data is stored in the data center, and the vast majority of data from critical applications resides in a SAN—enabling organizations to leverage the existing intelligence layer in the storage fabric. This layer provides a centralized framework in which to deploy, manage, and scale fabric-based data security solutions.

The storage fabric enables centralized management to support nearly every aspect of the data center, from server environments and workstations to edge computing and backup environments. As a result, it is an ideal place to standardize and consolidate a holistic data-at-rest security strategy. Organizations can also implement this type of best-practice methodology in other parts of the data center, helping to protect data throughout the enterprise.

Most current industry solutions include either host-based software encryption, device-embedded encryption, or edge encryption—all of which provide isolated services to specific applications but typically cannot scale across extended enterprise storage environments. In contrast, Brocade delivers fabric-based encryption for both disk- and tape-based storage devices as part of the industry-leading Brocade One™ strategy and innovative Brocade Adaptive Networking services.

Figure 1. The Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade plays a vital role in the Brocade One strategy.

Based on industry standards, Brocade encryption for data-at-rest provides centralized, scalable encryption and compression services that seamlessly integrate into existing Brocade Fabric OS  and Brocade M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS) environments.

The Brocade fabric-based approach to data encryption scales to meet performance requirements, provides a centralized point of management for both disk and tape storage security as well as key management, and supports heterogeneous storage environments. Deployment is simple and non-disruptive: Organizations can encrypt data from any switch port without reconfiguring the fabric.

Industry Standards Compliance
Brocade products conform to industry standards in a manner consistent with accepted engineering practices and procedures.

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