Array manufacturers should build support for self-encrypting drives into the firmware of their RAID controllers. The RAID controller holds the encryption key for each drive. Since we don't expect to be able to move drives from one storage system to another and use the data on the drive, each storage system can be its own key management domain with no need for an enterprise key management infrastructure. The overhead of storing encryption keys for several hundred drives, and retrieving them on array startup, should be minimal. The real work of encrypting and decrypting data happens in each drive, so it is the job of Seagate or Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to make it fast.
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Howard Marks is chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives Inc., a Hoboken, N.J.-based consultancy where he's been beating storage network systems into submission and writing about it in computer magazines since 1987. He currently writes for InformationWeek, which is published by the same company as Byte and Switch.
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