
If you’re building a private cloud, it’s probable that you have a load balancer, a firewall or some sort of appliance inside of your datacenter that helps your cloud operate. Each of these appliances have their own central processing units, so that the device can function autonomously. Cavium has released its new Nitrox V processor which is built with 288 security cores embedded directly on the chip. Cavium says the Nitrox V chips will be used in:
- Compression Engines
- Virtualization Hardware
- PCI-E Generation 3
Cavium goes on to say that its Nitrox V processor lineup is 3 to 10 times faster than its predecessor. The market for security processors is rapidly growing, thanks in part to cloud computing. You’ll commonly find security processors inside of networking equipment. Security processors are being seen more often inside of servers, Application Delivery Controllers, UTM Gateways WAN Optimization Appliances, routers, and switches.
“Customer applications running in VMs in the virtualized cloud data center need data traffic flowing to and from their VMs to be encrypted,” says a Cavium press release.
“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),” adds the press release.
The Nitrox V security processor also provides native support for the following:
- GZip
- PKZip
- LZS
- IPSec
- SSL
- TLS 1.X
- DTLS
- ECC Suite B
- AES
- 3DES
- SHA-2
- SHA-3
- RSA 2048
- RSA 4096
- RSA 8192
- ECC p256/p384/p521
- Kasumi
- ZUC
- SNOW 3G
More information about the new Cavium Nitrox security processors can be found at Cavium’s website.