Intel launches Hardware-based Self-Encrypting Solid State Drives

Data security is a big task for businesses as well as a challenge for IT leaders, whether it be securing networks or devices. Past few months, we often came across various data breaches, the largest among all was Target data breach, which cost a business nearly $50,000 in lost productivity, replacement and data recovery. 

Once a bad actor has stolen your hardware or compromised your network, the ability to lock down sensitive data is predominant.

To help mitigate these threats in order to protect businesses against data breaches without even damaging performance, Intel has announced its latest enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) that are self-encrypting, packaged with some powerful security and management features.

The New Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series of solid state drives offers significant performance with hardware-based 256-bit self-encryption to reduce the impact on the performance.

Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series will be offered in both 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 (60mm and 80mm) “gumstick” form factors for notebooks, tablets and the like, with storage capacities ranging from 120GB to 480GB for the 2.5-inch version and 180GB, 240GB, or 360GB for the M.2 format, the company said.

To secure data on corporate machines, they are also offering policy controls that comply with theTrusted Computing Group's OPAL 2.0 Security standard and Microsoft Windows eDrive compatibility.

"The need to protect assets, keep an eye on the bottom line, and ensure employees have the best tools is a challenge for IT departments," Rob Crooke, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), said in a statement.
"The Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series is a well-rounded solution to help balance those often competing needs. Adding the Pro 2500 Series to the Intel SSD Professional Family delivers a powerful storage solution to help businesses of all sizes meet their critical IT needs."

In terms of performance, Intel claims to deliver sequential read speeds of up to 540MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 480MB/s, with random 45K – 80K read / write IOPS. These number of ranges may not quite represent industry-leading performance in comparison to some of those fastest SSDs in the market currently but they're not too crummy either.

Although, hardware-based self-encrypting drives aren't new; Samsung, Sandisk and many companies also offering encryption to protect data without the loss of performance.

Pro 2500 Series drives have "five advance power modes, helping to balance performance and power to enable a longer battery life and provide a better mobile experience," Intel said.

The SSD 2500 Pro drive have expected to have mean time between failures (MTBF) rate of 1.2 million hours and features a world-class annualized failure rate (AFR) well below 1 percent. The Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series is backed by a 5-year limited warranty.

Reference- http://thehackernews.com/