Hardware Accelerator

SSL-intensive servers, such as the SRA Gateway, require large amounts of processing power to perform the encryption required for each secure transaction. Using a hardware accelerator in the Gateway speeds up the execution of cryptographic algorithms, thereby increasing the performance speed.

The Sun Crypto Accelerator 1000 board is a short PCI board that functions as a cryptographic co-processor to accelerate public key and symmetric cryptography. This product has no external interfaces. The board communicates with the host through the internal PCI bus interface. The purpose of this board is to accelerate a variety of computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms for security protocols in e-commerce applications.

See the Sun Java System Portal Server 6 Secure Remote Access 2005Q4 Administration Guide for more information on the Sun Crypto Accelerator 1000 board and other accelerators.

The Sun Crypto Accelerator 1000 board supports only SSL handshakes and not symmetric key algorithms. This is not generic to all other cryptographic accelerators. Other cryptographic accelerators are on the market and some of them can support symmetric key encryption.

You could use a hardware accelerator on the Netlet Proxy and Rewriter Proxy machine and derive some performance improvement.