Date: 27/10/2010

Cavium launches NITROX III security processors with integrated 16 to 64 cores

Cavium Networks has released NITROX III family of security processors for application Delivery, cloud computing and WAN optimization. The NITROX III security processors integrates 16 to 64 purpose-built security RISC cores with efficient compression engines and virtualization hardware with a PCI-Express Gen 2 interface.

The new security processors enable adoption of data center and cloud computing initiatives, and meets NIST (National institute of standards and technology) guidelines per SP 800-57 on doubling key size from 1024 bit to 2048 bit for Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

The NITROX III Security Processor family do not require external memory and are supported by Cavium's NITROX software development kit (SDK) and are software compatible with the current generation NITROX PX parts that are widely deployed at several Tier 1 networking and security vendors.

"High performance SSL with support for 2048 bit keys, virtualization, and traffic compression are key requirements in the data center market," said Bob Wheeler, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group. "Cavium's NITROX III processor family effectively addresses these requirements, enabling OEMs developing data center and cloud computing systems to benefit from the significantly increased security and compression performance, virtualization features, and power efficiency of these security processors."

"The NITROX III product line has received tremendous positive response and commitment from several Tier-1 customers in data-center, service-provider and WAN optimization areas," said Rajiv Khemani, VP & GM of the Networking & Communications Division, Cavium Networks. "With the unabated increase in security performance requirements, along with the increased need for WAN optimization and cloud virtualization, we are confident that the NITROX III processor will deliver a significant boost to the security processor market."

The key features of NITROX III Family include:
--Up to 4 Compression Engines - Enhanced Compression/decompression acceleration - 5 to 20Gbps. Support for GZIP, PKZIP, Inflate and Deflate algorithms. Also includes support for LZS Compression that is widely used for Storage applications.
--High bandwidth IO - PCI-Express Gen2 x16 supports up to 40 Gbps of security and 20 Gbps of Compression performance. Supports x4 and x8 lane configurations as well.
--Virtualization support - Single Root IO Virtualization feature on PCI-Express Gen 2 interface. Includes support for 8, 16, 32 or 64 virtual functions to meet the requirements of different system with a varying number of CPU cores or Virtual machines.
--Latest security features - Includes a Random Number Generator that is compliant to FIPS 140-3 NIST standard and support for a wide variety of protocols including IPsec, SSL TLS 1.2, DTLS and ECC Suite B. Also supports a wide variety of algorithms including several variants of AES, 3DES, ARC4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, RSA 2048, RSA 4096, Kasumi, EC-DH and EC-DSA.
--Low power dissipation - 10W to 20W options enables vendors to meet power requirements for data center equipment.

The NITROX III Software Development Kit (SDK) includes x86 driver for Linux, feature rich APIs for a variety of protocols, firmware and reference stacks for IPSec and SSL. The APIs, firmware and protocol stacks are compatible with the current NITROX PX SDK.

Availability:
The NITROX III processor family: Sampling in Q2 2011 with design collateral for early customers available in Q4 2010