Seagate today announced worldwide availability of the Seagate Secure Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option across its portfolio of enterprise-class hard drives. The Seagate SED drives are designed to deliver data-at-rest security for servers and storage systems. Products with the Seagate Secure option include the Savvio 15K.2, Savvio 10K.3, Constellation and Cheetah 15K.7 drives.

Features of Seagate SEDs

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. Key management standards to insure interoperability are being established via the IEEE 1619.3. All major storage system providers are participating in IEEE 1619.3.

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.