Compaq AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL

The performance solution for secure application servers: supports more than 200 SSL connections per second.

Features at a Glance

The performance bottleneck in SSL-secured application servers
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 millions of browsers and tens of thousands of application servers. It is a crucial element of many Internet applications, such as home banking, online trading, consumer e-commerce, intranets and extranets. As secure servers handle more and more SSL traffic, a performance bottleneck occurs which can severely effect customer satisfaction.

The SSL protocol supports 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 (with four 200-MHz processors) is severely taxed at only 12 SSL connections per second. The server's CPUs perform cryptographic processing with no 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 Compaq AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL solves the performance bottleneck
The immediate recourse to the performance bottleneck is to add another application processor. This is expensive and may require that additional memory be installed. The operations and management of the server will become more complex. 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 Compaq AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL brings the power of parallel processing to bear on the performance bottleneck of secure applications. It meets the PCI 2.1 specification and provides for easy installation and use. For example, a typical secure server (with four 200-MHz processors) is saturated when running at 12 SSL connections per second at 90 percent CPU utilization. The AXL200 PCI offloads security processing overhead and CPU utilization devoted to exponentiation drops to near zero. For less than the cost of another general-purpose processor, the AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card frees the server to run the business application.

The Compaq AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL ensures that a secure server grows with the business
As a secure application serves more customers, the AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card continues to alleviate the performance bottleneck caused by the compute-intense exponentiation. The AXL200 PCI can support more than 200 SSL connections per second.

The AXL200 PCI optimizes parallel exponentiators on the PCI card to ensure that the secure application server can grow with the needs of the business. This parallel architecture is much more cost-effective in alleviating the performance bottleneck of secure applications than any alternative method.

When performance of secure application servers is important, the Compaq AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL is the solution
The AXL200 PCI Accelerator Card for SSL supports the Netscape Enterprise Server, Novell Network Directory Server and Microsoft's IIS secure application environments. The AXL200 PCI for SSL can be installed on servers running on UNIX system (Compaq Tru64 UNIX, Sun Solaris) or Microsoft Windows NT platforms. Other platforms and application environments are supported on demand.

Specifications

Compatibility
Servers
Novell Directory Server (NDS), Netscape Enterprise Server 3.5, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)