Cavium unveils 100 Gbps NITROX® V Security Processor family

The NITROX V security processor family integrates up to 288 purpose-built security cores with high performance compression engines and virtualization hardware with PCI-Express Gen 3 and Interlaken interfaces. NITROX V family fortifies Cavium’s position in the security processor market as this family provides 3 -10 times greater performance than alternative solutions within the same power envelope. The NITROX product line is the industry leading security processor family designed into cloud data center servers and networking equipment, enterprise and service provider equipment including servers, Application Delivery Controllers, UTM Gateways WAN Optimization Appliances, routers, and switches.

Market Dynamics for Data Center Security & Compression

There are several trends driving the need for high performance and new crypto and compression functionality in Data Centers. Customer applications running in VMs in the virtualized cloud data center need data traffic flowing to and from their VMs to be encrypted. This east-west traffic flow drives high performance symmetric encryption bandwidth requirements for protocols such as IPsec.

At the same time, asymmetric cryptographic performance requirements are exploding as well driven by the need for SaaS providers such as search engines, email services and social networking services to encrypt all customer data they receive over the internet using SSL and new crypto schemes such as Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Today most of the SSL transactions use 2048 bit RSA key operations but given the massive growth in mobile clients, the need for high bandwidth Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is rapidly increasing.

Another major trend is the need for high performance data compression with excellent compression ratios for data center traffic. This widespread adoption of encryption (SSL or IPsec), new crypto schemes and compression is significantly changing the performance and functionality requirements in a data center and is driving the need for a new security and compression processor.

The NITROX V Security Processor family with its unique combination of performance, features and interfaces, provides an excellent solution to the data center security and compression challenges.

Introducing the NITROX V Security Processor Family

The NITROX V Security Processor family delivers unmatched SSL performance with 120K RSA Ops/Sec and 300K P256 ECC Ops/sec and bulk encryption performance of 100 Gbps for a variety of different protocols, flexibility to support emerging algorithms and protocols, latest IOs, virtualization features, compression performance and very low power consumption, enabling Cavium’s cloud provider and OEM customers to deliver breakthrough next generation solutions which address these critical requirements, in an optimized, energy efficient manner. The single-chip NITROX V processors do not require external memory enabling lower cost, power and real-estate.

Feature Highlights
· Up to 288 RISC Security Cores – Support up to 100Gbps of security performance simultaneously with 120K RSA Ops/sec for 2048 bit keys or 300K P256 ECC Multiply Ops/sec.
· Compression Engines - Enhanced Compression/decompression acceleration – 100 Gbps. Support for GZIP, PKZIP, Inflate and Deflate algorithms. Also includes support for LZS Compression that is widely used for Storage applications.
· High bandwidth IO – Supports 100 Gbps of traffic. PCI-Express Gen3 x8 and Interlaken x8 interfaces.
· Virtualization support – Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) feature with up to 256 Virtual Function support.
· Latest security features – Supports a wide variety of protocols including IPsec, SSL, TLS 1.x, DTLS and ECC Suite B. Also supports a wide variety of algorithms including several variants of AES, 3DES, SHA-2, SHA-3, RSA 2048, RSA 4096, RSA 8192, ECC p256/p384/p521, Kasumi, ZUC and SNOW 3G.