AXL300 SSL Hardware Accelerator for use on HP Alpha Systems

Models

PCI SSL Hardware Accelerator
NOTE: This option will EOL /Discontinue by the end of CY 2004.

• Supports over 330 SSL connections per second
• Supports over 660 SSL connections using CRT

• Overcomes the performance bottleneck of SSL-secured applications
  
• Accelerates SSL security processing for secure web application servers such as IIS 5.0, NES, iPlanet, Apache
  
• Adds a dedicated co-processor to the Alpha server, offloading cycle-consuming exponentiation
  
• Supports more than 330 SSL connections per second with standard Web servers
  
• Enabled with Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to improve performance with CRT-enabled applications
  
• Enabled with MultiPrime for MultiPrime-enabled applications such as wireless e-Commerce
  
• Provides a much lower cost per SSL connection per second than any product on the market
  
• Single card per system (not available on all Alpha platforms, refer to platform Supported Options List)
  
• Meets PCI 2.2 specifications for fast and easy installation
  
• Plugs directly into AlphaServer PCI I/O bus running Tru64 UNIX (OpenVMS support not available)

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a cryptographic protocol that protects the digital communications between a browser and a server. SSL is the de facto standard for Internet security today and is found in software in hundreds of millions of browsers and hundreds of thousands of application servers. It is a crucial element in many Internet applications such as home banking, online trading, and consumer e-commerce. As secure servers handle more and more SSL traffic, a performance bottleneck occurs which can severely affect customer satisfaction.

The SSL protocol provides a "handshake" between a browser and a server that establishes which cryptographic algorithms will be used for that session. This handshake requires the server to perform a compute-intense exponentiation of a cryptographic key. Performing this exponentiation in software, a typical secure server is severely taxed at only a handful of SSL connections per second. The server's CPUs perform cryptographic processing with few cycles left for business processing. A successful application may have new customers waiting to connect to the server. Customers may become frustrated and go elsewhere.

The immediate recourse to the performance bottleneck is to add another application processor. This can be expensive, and may require that additional memory be installed, which in turn, can result in more complex operations and system management. The preferred alternative is to offload all exponentiation processing to a special-purpose peripheral, leaving the general-purpose processor free to run the business application.

The AXL300 Accelerator PCI Card brings the power of a special-purpose peripheral processor to bear on the performance bottleneck of secure applications. It meets the PCI 2.2 specification and provides for easy installation and use. For example, a typical secure server is saturated running only a handful of SSL connects per second at 100 percent CPU utilization. The AXL300 PCI offloads security processing overhead, so that CPU utilization devoted to exponentiation drops to near zero. For much less than the cost of another general-purpose processor, the AXL300 Accelerator PCI Card frees the server to run the business application.

The AXL300 Accelerator PCI Card is only supported on a subset of the AlphaServer platform family. Refer to the Supported Options List -- http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/ -- for specific AlphaServers to determine support and configuration rules.

Warranty

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