Cavium Unveils 100 Gbps NITROX® V Security Processor Family

Integrates up to 288 purpose built Security cores
World’s Highest Performance Security & Compression Processors for Cloud Servers & Networking Equipment.

Singapore and San Jose, Calif. , July 22nd 2015 – Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, today unveiled NITROX V security processors & adapters. The newest members of the market leading NITROX family deliver unprecedented performance for security in the enterprise and virtualized cloud data centers. The NITROX V security processor family integrates up to 288 purpose-built security cores with high performance compression engines and virtualization hardware with PCI-Express Gen 3 and Interlaken interfaces. NITROX V family fortifies Cavium’s position in the security processor market as this family provides 3 -10 times greater performance than alternative solutions within the same power envelope. The NITROX product line is the industry leading security processor family designed into cloud data center servers and networking equipment, enterprise and service provider equipment including servers, Application Delivery Controllers, UTM Gateways WAN Optimization Appliances, routers, and switches.

Market Dynamics for Data Center Security & Compression

There are several trends driving the need for high performance and new crypto and compression functionality in Data Centers. Customer applications running in VMs in the virtualized cloud data center need data traffic flowing to and from their VMs to be encrypted.  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). Today most of the SSL transactions use 2048 bit RSA key operations but given the massive growth in mobile clients, the need for high bandwidth Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is rapidly increasing.  Another major trend is the need for high performance data compression with excellent compression ratios for data center traffic.  This widespread adoption of encryption (SSL or IPsec), new crypto schemes and compression is significantly changing the performance and functionality requirements in a data center and is driving the need for a new security and compression processor.

 The NITROX V Security Processor family with its unique combination of performance, features and interfaces, provides an excellent solution to the data center security and compression challenges.

Introducing the NITROX V Security Processor Family

The NITROX V Security Processor family delivers unmatched SSL performance with 120K RSA Ops/Sec and 300K P256 ECC Ops/sec and bulk encryption performance of 100 Gbps for a variety of different protocols, flexibility to support emerging algorithms and protocols, latest IOs, virtualization features, compression performance and very low power consumption, enabling Cavium’s cloud provider and OEM customers to deliver breakthrough next generation solutions which address these critical requirements, in an optimized, energy efficient manner. The single-chip NITROX V processors do not require external memory enabling lower cost, power and real-estate.

Feature Highlights

• Up to 288 RISC Security Cores – Support up to 100Gbps of security performance simultaneously with 120K RSA Ops/sec for 2048 bit keys or 300K P256 ECC Multiply Ops/sec.

• Compression Engines - Enhanced Compression/decompression acceleration – 100 Gbps. Support for GZIP, PKZIP, Inflate and Deflate algorithms. Also includes support for LZS Compression that is widely used for Storage applications.

• High bandwidth IO – Supports 100 Gbps of traffic.  PCI-Express Gen3 x8 and Interlaken x8 interfaces.

• Virtualization support – Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) feature with up to 256 Virtual Function support.

• Latest security features – Supports a wide variety of protocols including IPsec, SSL, TLS 1.x, DTLS and ECC Suite B. Also supports a wide variety of      algorithms including several variants of AES, 3DES, SHA-2, SHA-3, RSA 2048, RSA 4096, RSA 8192, ECC p256/p384/p521, Kasumi, ZUC and SNOW 3G.

• Supporting Industry Quotes 

“The increasing use of SSL and IPSec between clients and data centers, as well as within cloud data centers, is driving extreme performance requirements for encryption using 2,048-bit RSA keys and ECC curves," said Bob Wheeler, Principal Analyst at The Linley Group. "By delivering industry leading performance and power efficiency, Cavium's NITROX V processor family enables cloud service providers and data-center/enterprise OEMs to meet these requirements while optimizing equipment and operating costs." 

“Cavium is the market leader in security processors with a broad portfolio of products/IP and over a decade of operational experience in security processes and protocols,” said Rajneesh Gaur, Vice President & General Manager at Cavium.   “The NITROX V Security processor family built with this expertise addresses critical security feature and performance requirements of our target customers.”

“Citrix has successfully worked together with Cavium to offer cutting edge security features for several generations of its Netscaler family of products,” said Steve Shah, VP of Product Management at Citrix. 

“With the price/performance benefits that NITROX V offers, Citrix can significantly increase the security performance of its products in a cost efficient manner to meet the needs of the Cloud Data Center markets.”

“Over the past decade, Radware and Cavium have worked together to incorporate high performance SSL with NITROX Security Processors for Radware’s application delivery and load balancer products,” said Ben Carmi, vice president of product management at Radware. “As Cavium significantly increases the ECC performance with the NITROX V family, both Radware and Cavium can help address the ever growing ECC performance requirements in the Data Center.”

“Cavium’s NITROX Security Processors enable A10 Thunder Application Delivery Controllers to deliver exceptionally fast SSL processing speeds,” said Raj Jalan, CTO at A10 Networks.  “A10’s customers set the standard for security and privacy. With the high performance that NITROX V offers—especially for Perfect Forward Secrecy and ECC--A10 will be able to exceed our customers’ stringent security requirements in our next generation platforms.” 

Availability

The NITROX V Security processor family availability is targeted for Q3 2015.

About Cavium

Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in enterprise, data center, cloud and wired and wireless service provider applications. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium’s processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium’s principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India, and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com