Arena-MaxTronic Incorporates Seagate's Self-Encrypting HDDs

Arena-MaxTronich announced the supporting of self-encrypting drive (SED) to its entire portfolio of enterprise-class RAID systems.

arenamaxtronic_seagate

With the hardware-based full disk encryption technology, Arena-MaxTronic RAID system is a choice for current and future storage security investment. SED is going to be available by most of HDD vendors including Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Fujitsu, Samsung and Toshiba. Arena-MaxTronic is the first to introduce external RAID system supporting Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 and Constellation SED drives in Taiwan that help data center seamlessly upgrade their storage to government-grade, Trusted Computing Group (TCG) compliant security.

Data security is top of mind for most enterprises and a company’s data is one of its most valuable assets. Too many news revealed that data theft and security breaches which caused high customer notification costs, loss of customers, tarnished reputation and more over facing a series of legal proceeding, any of which can quickly put a company out of business. So how to protect the data-at-rest on storage devices is an important topic for nowadays’ data center and now they have a better choice since Arena-MaxTronic offers a simple, secure, and cost-effective encryption solution that addresses the needs of entry-level to enterprise-level data environments. On the other hand, drive retirement is another headache, especially for data sensitive enterprises such as banks, insurance companies, hospitals…they have to follow governmental laws and regulations to handle drive retirement and it is expensive, time-consuming and error-prone. There are several traditional ways to dispose of retired drive such as overwriting which takes days and there is no notification of completion from drive, shredding which is environmental hazardous and demagnetizing which is hard to ensure the degauss strength matched drive type.

Arena-MaxTronic has implemented Instant Secure Erase technology which is able to instantaneous ‘rapid’ erase for secure disposal or re-purposing.

In support of sustaining the environment, where reduce, reuse and recycle are keys to this best practice, Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 reduces power consumption, drive replacement costs, and costs per GB. Built for 3.5-inch Tier 1 storage applications, the Cheetah 15K.7 drive is the largest capacity mission-critical drives offered at up to 600GB capacity, and have the highest reliability in the industry. While the Seagate Constellation 500GB, 7200rpm, 2.5 inch drive meets the needs of the tier 2 near line storage applications. It includes a combination of features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security.

Seagate’s SED technology makes drive retirement and disposal easy by eliminating the need for the numerous manual processes involved which are often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone to error. For critical information that must remain secure, and because all systems are eventually retired, whether being relocated, re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on the Seagate SED hard drives remain AES-safe.

The RAID product series consists of FC to SAS, SAS to SAS and iSCSI to SAS RAID systems with industry standard rack-mount redundant and hot-swap chassis which are designed for ease of use and maintenance, offers Field Replacement Unit (FRU) for user to maintain a faulty system in the field without returning the whole system for repairing. Now Arena-MaxTronic supports SED to encrypt data within the hard drive to provide the optimal data security protection because that’s precisely where the data resides. It is very simple for Arena-MaxTronic customers to upgrade their on-going RAID from non-SED supported to SED supported through FW upgrade without system shutdowns. The advantages to use Arena-MaxTronic SED enabled RAID as the encryption policy to prevent data theft from any unauthorized access would be: