Yesterday, Seagate announced their self-encrypting drive (SED) technology is available across their enterprise line of drives. To start, Savvio, Cheetah, and Constellation will all feature an SED option with the arrival of Constellation ES to (I am sure) follow.
Joseph Kovar of ChannelWeb wrote a great piece explaining the opportunity for system builders and the channel.
Seagate working with the likes of LSI and Intel have made it easy for system builders and VARs to offer government grade encryption to their SMB customes. Seagate’s Teresa Worth, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, touts that Seagate’s enterprise SED options are “strong enough
for national security, yet easy enough for the one-person IT shop”.
This is critical to channel success, as system builders and VARs look for solutions that bring additional and immediate value to the SMB. The beauty of the solution provided by Seagate, LSI, and Intel is that it’s seamless. The drives along with the controller and/or motherboard provide instantaneous protection and save the system builder and VAR the costs of associated with testing, certifying, and launching new custom solutions.
Worth effectively summarized the seamlessness to the system builder as follows:
• Appears the same as traditional non-encrypting drives
• Operates at full drive speed – No impact to performance
• Automatically encrypts/ decrypts all data
• Ensures ease-of-use
• No changes to OS, applications, databases
• Leverages existing high availability / disaster recovery environments
• Optimizes storage efficiency and capacity
• Supports data compression and de-duplication technologies within the storage system
Check out Seagate’s SED page for more information on this exciting technology. Once again, it looks like Seagate continues to define what enterprise drives really are.
What do you think?
