Exar Sampling Data Security and Reduction Cards

Exar Corporation announced the DX 1700 series of PCI Express-based cards for the emerging unified storage and network infrastructure. The DX 1700 series is comprised of four cards and offers customers the industry’s most power-efficient encryption and compression solutions addressing the SOHO to Enterprise markets.

The massive increase in the amount of digital content and the wide-spread adoption of virtualization in the Enterprise is straining the storage and networking infrastructure, as well as the compute resources necessary to process the content. These challenges are not confined to just high-end platforms but are impacting cost sensitive consumer/SOHO environments as well. The DX 1700 series cards offload the computationally intensive tasks necessary to compress, deduplicate, and secure data in both block form for storage applications and packet form for networking applications.

“The move towards a unified storage and network infrastructure promises increased efficiencies -manageability, cost, resource utilization – but security remains a top concern,” said Zack Mihalis, senior director of marketing, Datacom and Storage business unit at Exar. “Our new DX 1700 series products not only enable greater efficiencies but also address our customers’ security concerns. These products provide both the encryption capability for security as well as hash-acceleration and compression for data reduction.”

About the DX 1700 series
The DX 1700 series architecture can simultaneously hash, encrypt, and compress both network and storage data at a throughput ranging from 100 MB/second to 800 MB/second. Alternative CPU – based solutions are expensive and would require multiple, dedicated enterprise-class quad core, dual-threaded x86 processors to achieve the same level of performance. While each processor in this category can easily consume 100 Watts or more, the DX 1700 series cards perform these tasks at a typical power consumption of 3.3 Watts or less. When these types of tasks are off-loaded from the host CPU, freed-up compute cycles can be used for their intended functions such as serving web pages, or performing database searches.

All of the DX 1700 cards support the current and newest encryption algorithms including AES-GCM and Elliptical Curve Cryptography used in Suite B applications, industry-standard lossless compression algorithms LZS, eLZS, as well as GZIP generally used for file and http compression applications, and the key authentication/hash algorithms which are imperative for accelerating deduplication.

All four cards deliver a high performance Public Key engine that supports up to 14k RSA operations per second. The DX 1700 series cards have either a x1 or x4 PCIe interface and all come standard with an SDK that supports Exar’s proprietary APIs, as well as the Intel® QuickAssist functional APIs. All DX 1700 series cards are half-height and halflength and offer the highest performance and functionality per watt in the industry. Additionally, the DX 1700 series supports open source applications such as OpenSSL and OpenSwan.

Samples of all four cards are available now with general availability of the series scheduled for end of July 2010.