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Cavium Networks Drives Widespread SSL Deployment with Comprehensive SSL Accelerator Family for Secure Servers and Appliances

Posted on: Monday, 10 November 2003, 06:00 CST

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Fueling the growing adoption of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) in secure servers and appliances, Cavium Networks, the cost and performance leader in security processing, today announced NITROX XL, its Comprehensive SSL Accelerator Product Family. This family consists of a wide range of board and software solutions that double the performance at half the cost compared to existing SSL accelerator solutions, and offer significant additional protocol-processing with both asymmetric and bulk encryption offload. Cavium also announced that Secure Computing and Array Networks are using its SSL Accelerator boards to obtain industry-leading performance, price/performance and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) levels of security. Cavium SSL Accelerator products are used by OEM customers and Enterprise IT managers to increase the performance of Microsoft IIS and Apache web servers, SSL-VPN gateways, Microsoft Exchange Email servers, RSA BSAFE SSL Toolkit users, and Load-balancing switches -- and increase efficiency of server infrastructure.

SSL is a technology that is included in every browser -- and until recently, has been primarily used for secure e-commerce transactions. Taking advantage of its pervasiveness in client devices, network equipment and server vendors are now implementing SSL technology in new server and gateway applications driving increased growth in SSL usage. According to Infonetics Research, the SSL VPN Equipment market is expected to exceed $800 Million by end of 2005. Use of SSL Server Peripheral cards and dedicated appliances is growing rapidly. SSL is also increasingly being used as part of Microsoft Exchange servers to secure communication between email servers and clients.

Comprehensive SSL Accelerator Board Portfolio

Cavium's comprehensive product portfolio consists of ten distinct 32/64-bit PCI / PCI-X board products that range in SSL performance from 900 RSA OPS (operations per second) to 28,000 RSA 1024 bit exponent OPS, which is the highest performance available in a PCI/PCI-X board. Both 3.3V and 3/5V universal configurations are supported to plug into any PCI / PCI-X-based server configuration. The accelerator boards work with Cavium's unique macro-processing software APIs to minimize PCI bus utilization and support the complete set of SSL protocol versions: SSL 2.0, 3.0, TLS, as well as cryptographic algorithms: RSA, DH, ARC4, DES, 3DES, AES (all modes), MD-5 and SHA-1.

"We are using Cavium's NITROX XL SSL Accelerator boards in our recently announced Sidewinder(R) G2 Firewall(TM) v6.1 to provide client-less SSL VPN remote access and web-server security for SSL sessions," said Mike Gallagher, Senior Vice President of Development at Secure Computing Corporation. "We chose Cavium's SSL acceleration solution because of the wide performance options, rich feature set and easy software integration."

Cavium's FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Compliant Solution

Cavium's NITROX XL NFB Board is the industry's highest performance solution that is compliant with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Levels 2 and 3. It is a 64-bit/66MHz 3V/5V PCI Card in a secure, tamper-proof enclosure, which delivers 12,000 RSA OPS and over 500Mbps of SSL record processing with support of bulk encryption algorithms DES, 3DES, AES, ARC4. The FIPS board includes storage for 100,000 concurrent SSL sessions and 4096 private server keys. A serial interface to PIN entry devices (PEDs) is provided for FIPS Level 3 configurations.

"We chose Cavium's FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant SSL Accelerator solution which offers unparalleled performance, cost and the unique capability of SSL macro-processing offload to address the needs of federal and financial customers," said Lawrence Lu, VP Engineering and CTO, Array Networks. "Cavium's SSL Accelerator boards enable Array to provide unprecedented speed, scalability and security in our SSL VPN and integrated traffic management product lines."

"For SSL to be ubiquitous for VPNs and other emerging applications, hardware acceleration needs to be highly cost-effective and easy to integrate into network equipment and servers," said Eric Mantion, Senior Analyst, In-Stat/MDR. "With a range of performance, security options and dramatically lower cost, Cavium's SSL board products make it easier for customers to utilize SSL in high-growth applications with leading performance."

Broad Range of Driver and Application Stack Support

All Cavium standard PCI, PCI-X and FIPS PCI SSL Accelerator boards come with a rich, full-featured set of software drivers, utilities, a common API set and reference application software. Microsoft Windows drivers, certified through Windows hardware quality labs, are provided for easy installation and acceleration of Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) performance. Linux and FreeBSD drivers are provided to accelerate Apache Web server performance. Driver software code is also provided in an operating-system independent format to easily port to other operating systems. RSA's BSAFE SSL-C toolkit software has been optimized for Cavium's SSL Accelerator boards and is available from RSA Security .

Product Pricing and Availability

All NITROX XL Accelerator FIPS compliant and non-FIPS boards are available immediately. Pricing for the PCI/PCI-X SSL Accelerator boards ranges from $64.50 to $825 in quantities of 1K units. Pricing for the FIPS PCI SSL Accelerator board is $6,900 in quantities of 100. Drivers and open-source application software code are provided at no additional charge.

About Cavium Networks

Cavium Networks is a semiconductor solutions company delivering the industry's largest family of network security products. Cavium's award winning NITROX families of security processors and NITROX XL families of accelerator boards offers solutions delivering 50 Mbps to 10Gbps of encryption bandwidth with 1K to 50K RSA/DH operations per second. Cavium's highly integrated, feature rich NITROX families of Security Macro Processors deliver unprecedented performance in wired and wireless network security applications and SSL based secure e-Business while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of deployment. Cavium Networks is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, CA with an IC design center in Marlboro, MA. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com/

NOTE: Product photos, datasheets and application notes are available upon request. NITROX(TM) is a trademark of Cavium Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

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