Brocade Collaborates With EMC

LAS VEGAS -- Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in data center networking solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, and EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today 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.”

Brocade Communications Systems Inc.