Optimizing Resources

You can optimize resources by using the following:

• Hardware Accelerator

• Sun Enterprise Midframe Line

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.

Sun Enterprise Midframe Line

Normally, for a production environment, you would deploy Portal Server and SRA on separate machines. However, in the case of the Sun Enterprise^TM midframe machines, which support multiple hardware domains, you can install both Portal Server and SRA in different domains on the same Sun Enterprise midframe machine. The normal CPU and memory requirements that pertain to Portal Server and SRA still apply; you would implement the requirements for each in the separate domains.

In this type of configuration, pay attention to security issues. For example, in most cases the Portal Server domain is located on the intranet, while the SRA domain is in the DMZ.