Hitachi Data Systems Corporation recently announced significant enhancements to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ family. The USP family offers customers a best-in-class storage services platform to help boost heterogeneous storage asset utilization, enabling them to more efficiently manage business–critical operations and lower storage management costs.

What makes this solution so effective is the Hitachi high–end enterprise controller design which enables the most advanced functionality—including advanced security features such as the new internal data encryption, virtualization, logical partitioning, thin provisioning, business continuity and disaster recovery services across the enterprise storage infrastructures. This pace of innovation is unmatched in the industry.

The several enhanced security features enable customers to focus on regulatory compliance and corporate governance, while reducing complexity and cost. The enhancements also enable significant heat and power savings, compared with other alternative technologies.

The new controller–based encryption of data–at–rest feature provides confidentiality protection for internal hard disk drives by translating the data into secret code in the encrypting back–end director as it is written to the drives and decrypting the data when it is read. So IT managers can encrypt data on all internal hard disk drives, and return drives with sensitive information for maintenance purposes, while ensuring data confidentiality.

Additionally, the integrated key management can be used to securely export encryption keys that can be backed up and stored at an offsite location or with a commercial key escrow service for added security. Hitachi is the only vendor that encrypts data through the storage controller, and therefore does not require host CPU power or expensive inline appliances. This benefits customers by offering lower cost, a lower energy footprint, and greater heat and power savings.