Datacentre networking firm Brocade has teamed up with encryption giant Thales to announce the integration of Thales Encryption Manager for Storage with the Brocade encryption SAN switching solutions.

The combination of Thales' standards-based encryption key management appliance for storage, and Brocade's switching solutions, will help to simplify the storage encryption process, boost compliance efforts and improve overall security in the datacentre, the firms said.

With the new agreement, customers will be able to take advantage of Brocade's first generation of products for fabric-wide encryption of data at rest, including the Brocade Encryption Switch and the Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade, in the knowledge that their encryption keys are under control, according to Brocade.

"We are different because of the level of performance and scalability our products offer," said Brocade product marketing manager Jose Carreon. "Our 48Gbit/s to 96Gbit/s encryption processing delivers at least five times the speed of what's out there at the moment."

Thales Encryption Manager for Storage, meanwhile, is a ready-to-use appliance that consolidates and automates the management of encryption keys for storage systems in a transparent and auditable manner, according to the firm.

The system supports the draft IEEE P1619.3 key management specification, and will enable Brocade to satisfy some of its European customers that are requesting a key management solution not engineered and developed by a US firm, said Carreon.

Data protection has been gaining in urgency among UK firms, following much bigger fines being imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office and the Financial Services Authority. PCI compliance, meanwhile, is still as important as ever, according to Thales director of product marketing, Kevin Bocek.

"It's great if all your sensitive data stays in the datacentre, but it goes away if it goes on tape to archive and when it's disposed of on disk," he said. "The challenge is that there are lots of different systems at play within an enterprise, and there are lots of reasons why the protection of data is being looked at a lot more closely."