April 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Fujitsu double encryption on mobile drives
Fujitsu, (I mean Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc) is announcing today the MHZ2 CJ series, a new line of 2.5 drives with FDE (full disk encryption) capabilities, joining rivals Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) and Seagate who have been shipping similar hardware based encryption on some of their models.
The additional twist that Fujitsu puts on their MHZ2 CJ drives is 256 bit AES encryption, which should ensure an even stronger protection than what rival solutions provide, Fujitsu suggests. During a briefing, David James, vice president of advanced product engineering for Fujitsu suggested that without the right key it's virtually impossible to disclose the drive's data content and that the automatic encryption has no impact on the performance of the drive.
The new drives will offer up to 320 GB capacity, SATA connectivity and will spin at 7200 RPM which makes them likely candidates for deployment in high-end laptop models. Fujitsu is not disclosing pricing at the moment, but it's reasonable to expect that adding a new provider of drives with hardware based encryption will, in time, make those device more affordable and widely deployed.
James referred to some (unspecified) industry reports estimating that 700,000 laptops are stolen every year, which creates significant costs and embarrassment that can be easily avoided if companies deploy FDE on machines expected to carry sensitive data.
Waiting for quantity shipment to begin in July, I look forward to reviewing the new drives and comparing them with Hitachi's and Seagate's models.
Posted by Mario Apicella on April 21, 2008 08:26 AM
August 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Test Center Tracker: BRMS wars, mainframe futures, and encryption caveats
BRMS Pushmi-Pullyu: Doctor Doolittle's two-headed llama has nothing on ILOG's JRules, a product that is moving forward and backward at the same time. JRules 5.0, which James Owen reviewed in June 2005, was a silky combination of strong performance and rich rule tools, nabbing the highest score we've given to a rule management system. But by the time of Owen's evaluation of JRules 6.0 and top rival Blaze Advisor 6.1 in July 2006, JRules had not only lost ground in performance to the Fair Isaac engine, it stumbled on documentation at the same time it introduced more complexity in its tools and repository. With Version 6.5, reviewed last week by Stephen Nunez, JRules continues the flow of important new functionality -- now exposing decision logic as Web services -- but hasn't reversed the ebb in performance, documentation, or general ease of use.
Project Big Green: We already knew that the mainframe is harder to kill than Stephen Seagal. The mainframe's resource management and high availability features are unparalleled, and it has virtualization capabilities that the x86 can only dream about. Although "mainframe migration" stories sprout like weeds from enterprise IT publications, if you ask deep-pocketed IT shops (think IRS) that can actually afford what they really want, they'll tell you they're running their most important apps on Big Iron. Turns out there may be another reason to invest in the monoliths: IBM claims they are more energy efficient than little iron. See Ted Samson's report in Sustainable IT.
Encryption dos and dont's: Embarrassing data breaches are all the rage these days, and encryption seems like a sensible, no-brainer solution. But as Roger Grimes points out in Friday's column, file encryption is not as simple as lock and key. Encryptors can require a surprising amount of free disk overhead. Some files will refuse to be encrypted. Some encryption processes leave readable traces of file text behind. Before you take the plunge, check these considerations and caveats from the Security Advisor.
Posted by Doug Dineley on August 6, 2007 10:52 AM