Brocade Partners with Thales on Encryption

To facilitate this process, Brocade today is partnering with Thales to better integrate the Thales encryption appliance with encryption blades that plug directly into the Brocade storage area network.

Brocade officials claim their SAN offerings can provide 10 times the bandwidth of rival offerings, which they said is needed to support new encryption standards such as the IEEE P1619.3 key management specification and the more recent OASIS KMIP key management standard. Thales is the first company to support the IEEE standard and a co-author of the OASIS KMIP standard.

The Brocade Encryption Switch, meanwhile, was recently certified by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as being FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant. Thales expects to receive similar certification shortly.

Brocade, which expects to sign similar partnerships with other encryption vendors in the coming year, sees encryption as a primary driver of storage upgrades as IT organizations look to cope with the impact of an increasing number of regulations that require encrypted data. The expectation is that the impact of these much larger encrypted files will be substantial enough to compromise the performance of existing storage systems.