EMC embeds RSA within Symmetrix DMX-3
EMC embeds RSA within Symmetrix DMX-3
February 7, 2007: I don’t want to buy more security, I want a secure a product.
That’s what Clive Gold, EMC Australia’s national product manager, says people want with the announcement of EMC’s first integration of RSA with the Symmetrix platform. The new features will prevent “unauthorised service actions”, ensure legacy disks are erased and provide organisations with an audit log actions to the Symmetrix platform.
Administrators watch out. The RSA-based security and auditing features will be offered as part of the new release of Enginuity - the Symmetrix operating system - addressing concerns over administrator access to company information.
“If you look at any system out there, administrators can do what they want unless you have both security and auditing,” says Gold. He says that heads of business want to be able to “hold their hand to their heart” when they say that no one has inappropriately accessed or used company information.
Gold says, “Security is the biggest issue. You need to understand who can get access while being able to prove that people didn’t get access. We’re getting a lot of demand for that locally from the likes of NAB and ANZ. They want to be able to say that nobody has accessed restricted information.”
Despite his past conviction that compliance was not a major driver for EMC’s business in Australia, Gold now says there is growing concern amongst his board member customers whose homes are “on the line” because of new legislation being tested in the courts through key regulators such as the ATO, ASIC and APRA.
Data erasure is also enabled with the integration of RSA. Adhering to the US Department of Defense specification 5220.22-M, data on any failed disk drives will be erased within the system while an auditable record of data erasure is provided to the customer. EMC says it will be offering a “comparable feature” across its storage portfolio.
Scott Crawford, Senior Analyst and Security and Risk Management Practice Manager, Enterprise Management Associates believes combining RSA technology “signals that EMC intends to leverage its dominance in information management to achieve dominance in data security.”
Gold says that this is part of EMC’s strategy to deliver to customers “a secure foundation” plus security all the way through the stack to ensure nobody has inappropriately accessed or used the information with or outside the organisation.
Other key features include support for 4 GB/s Fibre Channel and FICON Connectivity; support for RAID 6; Dynamic Cache Partitioning enabling users to segregate memory resource allocation on eight dynamic partitions for different applications to maximise performance under varied workloads; Symmetrix Priority Controls which allows users to assign priority levels based on service level requirements for different applications; and SRDF/A Reserve Capacity software to safeguard continuous remote replication operations by buffering in-transit data to disk during temporary outages and/or network congestion.