Date: 10/10/2011

Exar adds open source support for SSL and IPsec to its processors

Exar Corporation has added open source support for SSL and IPsec to their family of security processors and Express DX acceleration cards. This includes OpenSSL support for SSL and strongSwan and OpenSwan support for Ipsec and the addition of these new protocols provides hardware-accelerated security solutions for Web, Cloud and Network applications.

"Cloud and web based applications consist of multiple workloads with different attributes" said Zack Mihalis, division vice president, DataCom and Storage Business Unit, Exar. "The traditional 'one size fits all' approach of simply using more CPU cores to address workload and security requirements is no longer cost effective or efficient. Hardware-accelerated security solutions enable customers to optimize application performance and network bandwidth, as well as reduce overall system power consumption."

Although general purpose CPUs have gotten faster, encryption, authentication, and public key processing for OpenSSL are computationally intensive and can saturate multiple multi-core CPUs. This issue will be magnified as the market transitions from 1K to 2K public key sizes and more web sites use SSL for security (i.e., HTTPS sites). Exar says Express DX cards and security processors can off-load these protocols and algorithms and reduce CPU utilization by over 95% enabling optimized workloads, higher system performance and reduced overall power consumption.

The new security offerings are available now in Exar's 8200 series of security processors and Express DX card families.