Erik Riedel
Storage Security - From Research to Industry Best Practice

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Storage has become central to many areas of computing, whether in data centers or in pockets, backpacks and briefcases around the world. Many consumers, corporations and governments are quickly learning that their stored data is more valuable and longer-lived than the computing devices used to access it. This talk will motivate the need for strong protection of stored data, and describe the incubation of Seagate's DriveTrust technology for data encryption. The talk will also briefly discuss additional efforts at Seagate Research that will allow disc drives to be more efficient and clever in the storage and the retrieval of bits and in better supporting the varied systems that turn those bits into information.

Erik Riedel, Ph.D. is Director of Interfaces & Architecture at Seagate Research in Pittsburgh, PA. His group focusses on novel storage devices and systems with increased intelligence to optimize performance, improve security, improve reliability, automate management, and enable smarter organization of data. The group's work targets all Seagate product families from those in large-scale enterprise storage clusters to ad-hoc collections of consumer and mobile storage devices working together.

Erik is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, helping to lead industry-wide education, technology promotion and standardization efforts. He also serves on the technical advisory board for The Technology Collaborative supporting technology startups in Pennsylvania.

Before joining Seagate, Erik was a researcher in the storage program at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA working on networked storage, distributed storage and security. He has authored and co-authored nine granted patents and a number of pending patent applications, as well as numerous technical publications on a range of storage-related topics.

Erik holds B.S., M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. His thesis work was on Active Disks as an extension to Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD). Erik was born in Wuerzburg, Germany and - even after over 30 years in the United States - is still occasionally puzzled by strange American customs like peanut butter.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler