The Milpitas, Calif.-based company will be releasing two new versions of its CryptoStor Tape family of products: a Fibre Channel device -- the CrypoStor Tape FC712 -- and a SCSI device -- the CryptoStor Tape SC702, said Dore Rosenblum, vice president of marketing.

The devices support native 4Gbit/sec. interfaces, compared to the current 2Gbit/sec. throughput, but because tape drives can't receive data at that speed, the enhancement has the effect of allowing the appliance to support twice as many tape drives, Rosenblum said.

Both appliances work with the company's existing CryptoStor KeyVault key management appliance for centralized backup and sharing of encryption keys. Keys can be either 128-bit or 256-bit AES.

Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn., said an advantage of 4Gbit/sec. support is that the same number of tape drives can be supported using fewer ports on the storage system. In addition, consolidating several drives on one channel means that a slow tape drive doesn't effect throughput to other drives, he said.

The SCSI version is due to ship in November for US$16,900, while the Fibre Channel version is due early next year for $45,000.