Seagate Bakes Security into Its ‘Fleet’ of Enterprise Drives

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Given the recent spate of high-profile breaches, IT security is a touchy topic these days. With its Enterprise Datasphere Fleet lineup of enterprise-grade hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), Seagate is ensuring that its products aren’t to blame when security mishaps occur.

The data storage provider announced its Seagate Secure initiative on Oct. 17, involving a coordinated set of security features that encompasses its Enterprise Datasphere Fleet drives.

“Seagate Secure ensures every drive complies with the top industry standards for security, with two feature sets — Essential and Certified — to meet different application requirements,” wrote Seagate marketer John Paulsen, in a blog post. “The Essential feature set delivers protection that suits most needs; the Certified feature set meets requirements for government or enterprise customers running highly secure, data sensitive services and applications.”

Essential Seagate Secure drives feature hardware-based encryption (AES 256) and lock themselves when the systems containing them are powered down. Additionally, the company’s SD&D (Secure Download and Diagnostics) technology offers rogue firmware detection, locked diagnostics ports and a secure boot process. It also blocks cross-segment downloads, for added data protection.

To ensure sensitive data that once stored on a wiped drive doesn’t come back to haunt IT teams, Seagate’s Instant Secure Erase feature enables administrators to change the encryption key on a drive, rendering its data irretrievable. The feature adheres to the NIST 800-88 and ISO 27040 erasure standards and Seagate claims it offers complete data erasure in mere seconds.

Finally, Seagate is also assuring customers that its supply chain, a potential source of security headaches for any organization, is locked up tight. Suppliers must meet the company’s security standards and Seagate itself complies with the Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard (O-TTPS), which helps make certain that IT products aren’t contaminated with malicious technologies or include counterfeit components that may weaken security.

Certified Seagate Secure builds on the safeguards set by Essential and adds FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance, allowing federal agencies handing sensitive information to use the drives for the storage workloads. Other certifications include the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation and the Trade Agreement Act, the latter of which meets the U.S. Government’s product origin requirements and is used by 126 countries.

Seagate Secure covers every Exos HDD and Nytro SSD under the company’s new Enterprise Datasphere Fleet banner.

“Seagate Exos Enterprise hard drives are purpose-built for a multitude of applications, workloads and storage tiers to maximize your storage efficiency,” explained Paulsen in a separate blog post. “They deliver the scalable capacity you need to harness the power of the datasphere, providing top performance and the highest capacity for enterprise data centers for the most efficient and cost-effective data center footprint available on the market today.”

Nytro SSDs, in capacities of up to 15TB, can sustain data throughput rates of up to 8GB per second, for brisk application performance. More information is available here.

Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez is a contributor to Datamation, eWEEK, and the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro.

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