Breaking News - Fujitsu Announces Full Disk Encryption Technology for Laptops
Fujitsu Computer Products of America has announced full disk encryption (FDE) for its 2.5-inch 7,200RPM SATA hard disk drive (HDD) line-up, improving security for a large segment of data at rest that was beyond the reach of most enterprise solutions. The Fujitsu MHZ2 CJ series uses the AES-256 encryption standard enabling the HDD to provide strong data protection from unauthorized access by setting a 256-bit password.
Fujitsu has been "making disk drives for about 40 years and is one of the major players in the industry," David James, vice president, advanced product engineering, Fujitsu, told 5 Minute Briefing. "One of our main product lines is the two-and-a-half-inch drives for mobile systems. We make millions and millions of small drives that go into laptop computers. This is the first drive that we have announced that has got hardware encryption on board," James said. The new offering is aimed particularly at enterprise business and government applications, James said, pointing to legislative requirements and government rules that increasingly are requiring data to be encrypted in laptop machines, "but there is definitely a consumer interest in it as well."
There are advantages that the encrypting disk drive has over commonly used software-based approaches, James explained. With software encryption, there is a performance impact, and in some applications it can be "quite severe," he said. Additionally, he noted, “Software-based encryption requires encryption keys to be in main memory which exposes them to Trojans and malware.”
In Fujitsu’s MHZ2 CJ series, encryption and decryption are performed by the hardware of the drive instead of by the computer's CPU and memory. The key used to encrypt and decrypt data is cryptographically regenerated at power-on, and is not known even to the HDD when the system is powered off. The drive automatically encrypts and decrypts the data with no impact on the system performance. This provides an effective security method for mobile computing, the vendor said.
Along with the full disk encryption protection, the Fujitsu MHZ2 CJ series also addresses organizations' needs to make data on the drive inaccessible when redeploying or disposing of the drive. The secure erase feature immediately invalidates every piece of data just by changing the in-drive encryption key, making the stored data completely indecipherable. With this immediate and secure erasure, the drive significantly saves time and costs for users and companies. For more information, go here.
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CA and Opalis Partner to Enhance Data Center IT Process Automation
CA and Opalis Software have announced an OEM partnership that will enhance CA's data center automation (DCA) offerings with IT process automation technology from Opalis.
Under the new partnership agreement, CA will broaden its suite of IT process automation solutions with those of Opalis, better enabling companies to design, build, and orchestrate workflows for managing complexity and improving service quality. CA workload automation solutions will be combined with Opalis technology will consolidate and streamline the process and workflows CA customers must coordinate to deliver their production workloads, said Will Bauman, senior vice president of workload automation at CA.
Enhancing CA's data center automation solutions with the Opalis IT process automation technology was a logical choice for the company, Bauman told 5 Minute Briefing. “What you can expect to see in the coming months from CA is more integration with IT process automation, more integration with Opalis," he said. There are already several CA products that are supported by the Opalis Integration Server, and new announcements are expected within the next few months, the vendors said.
It is clear that CA "gets" very clearly that they need to leverage its strength and “huge market presence” in workload automation and expand that up into areas associated with job scheduling, Todd DeLaughter, president and CEO for Opalis, told 5 Minute Briefing. "We are thrilled to be working with CA and think we can bring a nice complement to the already strong market position that they have driven."
CA said its data center automation solutions enable IT to leverage business policies and best practices to implement policy-driven automation for change, configuration and provisioning processes, as well as for automation of complex, high-volume workloads. CA DCA solutions also help optimize utilization of physical and virtual assets, supporting "Green IT" initiatives and improving staff efficiency so that resources can focus on proactive management and strategic business objectives.
Opalis delivers solutions that enable IT process automation inside and outside the data center across heterogeneous IT ecosystems. Opalis said it employs a scalable "enterprise services" architecture to automate processes and workflows for critical IT initiatives, such as virtualization, provisioning, ITIL-compliant processes, disaster recovery, consolidation, and security. In addition to integration with CA, Opalis enables integration with other systems management tool vendors including EMC, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, BladeLogic, BMC Software, and HP Software.
For more information about CA, go here. For more about Opalis, go here.
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Pano Logic Introduces New Version of Virtual Desktop Solution
Pano Logic has announced a new version of its desktop virtualization solution that adds capabilities for remote-office wide area network (WAN) deployments, dual monitor desktops, support for VMware's Virtual Desktop Manager, and offers certified support for wireless bridges and USB devices.
The new release, Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.0, includes hardware clients and software components designed to turn standard virtual infrastructure into a virtual desktop solution, according to the vendor. The new release includes the Pano Device, which connects keyboard, mouse, display, audio and USB peripherals over an existing IP network to an instance of Windows XP or Vista running on a virtualized server.
An additional module is Pano Manager, a centralized service and Web-based management interface that enables administrators to manage the virtual desktop installation by integrating with existing directory services and virtual infrastructure managers. Another new feature, Pano Desktop Service, is a lightweight service residing within each desktop virtual machine, which links peripherals attached to the Pano to the unmodified Windows drivers residing in the virtual machine.
Pano Logic’s go-to-market strategy focuses on "leveraging the value of server virtualization all the way out to the desktop," Benjamin Baer, vice president of marketing of Pano Logic, told 5 Minute Briefing. "We are focused on building, from the ground up, an easy to use low-entry point, complete solution for desktop virtualization." He added that it takes about 60 minutes to install Pano VDS on top of VMware.
An additional enhancement in Pano VDS 2.0 include optimization for wide area network (WAN) deployments, which enables organizations to deploy Pano Logic at remote offices while keeping the desktop virtual machines and data storage secure in the corporate or regional data center. The new release also includes support for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager, which enables integration into existing desktop virtualization deployments that use VMware for management.
There is also dual-monitor support in the new release and certification for wireless bridge and USB devices. The certification, said Baer, is a response to customers who told the company they understand that "technically this all works," but "we want you to qualify it and support it." There are a variety of peripherals and "they just want us to state that we tested that device and we absolutely will support the device and we know it works," he explained.
In addition, Baer noted, the new release enables IT administrators to have fine-grained control over what USB devices they want to enable and which ones they don't. "For example, if the Pano Logic device is physically located inside the LAN, all the USB ports are enabled but that very same user authenticating themselves outside of the LAN might have all the USB ports turned off," he said.
Pano VDS 2.0 is scheduled to be released May 5, 2008. For more information, go here.
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Sigma Resources & Technologies Integrates with VMware Lab Manager
Sigma Resources & Technologies, a supplier of testing technologies for networking, security, telecom and wireless, announced it has integrated its test automation solution with VMware Lab Manager and has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The new relationship is intended to enable end-users to deploy Sigma's SigmationTF testing framework and VMware's lab automation and other virtualization products to accelerate application development and deployment, as well as smooth the transition between physical and virtual platforms.
SigmationTF, a test automation framework designed for testing TCP/IP-based network products, automates test running and enables reporting and archiving of test results. VMware Lab Manager is an image library management and automated provisioning system for use with VMware Infrastructure, the data center virtualization and management platform. VMware Lab Manager reduces server, storage and provisioning costs for a range of scenarios, including application development and testing. Working together, VMware Lab Manager provisions the multi-tier virtual machine configuration, while SigmationTF automatically orchestrates the tests that run on VMware Infrastructure.
The relationship with VMware gives SigmationTF users a lab solution that enables "once-configured, forever-reproducible" test cases, according to Jia-Ru Li, vice president, technology, Sigma Resources & Technologies. The solution will free companies from being concerned about which virtual devices they have, the configuration of remote machines, as well as configuration within physical environments. This integration will help organizations test "much more efficiently," Li told 5 Minute Briefing.
For more information about Sigma Resources & Technologies, go here.
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Stratavia Updates Data Center Automation Toolset
Stratavia, a provider of data center automation software, has announced it is shipping a new release of Data Palette, a platform that automates complex, manually intensive but repetitive IT administration tasks. Data Palette 5.0 includes an AJAX-based user interface design, as well as advances in standardizing and automating complex, error-prone tasks.
A key enhancement in the new release is in the area of automated server provisioning for physical and virtual Linux, Windows and Solaris environments. Customers adding new servers to their data center can use Data Palette to recognize and integrate the new hardware into the network and automatically provision requisite operating systems, applications, and patches. "We actually already had what I would call a solution for automated server provisioning, but the uptake was significant enough for us to dedicate some engineering resources to maturing that capability," Mike Puterbaugh, vice president of marketing for Stratavia, told 5 Minute Briefing. "We have now included templates for most common server builds. We included a software library within Data Palette, so now our customers can upload their preferred corporate standard images up to the product to be used as part of automation sequences. We have also included some hardening profiles for servers and database servers as well - CIS [Center for Internet Security] and PCI compliance hardening has been included in this release."
Enhancements in policy-driven automation are aimed at further standardizing and streamlining IT administration tasks, "giving our customers the ability to manage large numbers of assets centrally," said Puterbaugh. Large IT organizations are managing servers not on a one-to-one basis but on a one-to -1,000, or even one-to-2,000 basis, "so they are looking for ways to perform automation against these machines as a means of policy,” said Puterbaugh. "This is the ability for us to remove ad-hoc administration of individual servers."
Data Palette 5.0 also provides virtual lifecycle management to accelerate enterprise deployments, seamlessly managing physical and virtual environments with technologies such as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Sun Solaris 10 and XenSource.
Centralized Web-based administration allows users to create standard operating procedures through an intuitive "digital whiteboard." Puterbaugh said that Data Palette has moved “completely to a thin client interface. We are now the only automation platform to be fully enabled via thin client as well as a single interface." IT administrators can create workflows for specific tasks, using a drag and drop approach, rather than hard coding. Data Palette also now features an internal search engine capability to tag and track these workflows, increasing the ease for team members to collaborate by sharing steps or workflows across common tasks. For more information, go here.
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