SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Cavium Networks, the cost and performance leader in security processing today announced the NITROX II™ family of In-line Security Macro Processors that eliminates the security processing bottleneck by providing a range of true “bump-in-the-wire” processors with performance ranging from 2 Gbps to 10 Gbps of IPsec or SSL security protocol processing. The single chip NITROX II family equipped with high performance, streaming SPI-3 and SPI-4 interfaces complements Cavium’s award-winning NITROX Lite, NITROX and NITROX Plus family of security processors, which started shipping in production volumes in 2002. The NITROX II family of processors will be used in a wide range of multi-gigabit networking equipment such as routers, switches, web-servers, server load balancers, firewalls, SANs, and VPN gateways, enabling a secure and authenticated Internet."IPSec VPNs are mainstream, and SSL-based VPN products are starting to ship in volume, " said Jeff Wilson Executive Director, of Infonetics Research. "All types and sizes of organizations are rolling out encrypted network services. NITROX II, with its in-line functionality and wide performance range will enable networking vendors to quickly integrate cost effective, wire speed security into existing networking equipment and meet the market demand of wide-spread security deployment."Existing security processors that off-load IPsec security protocol processing are look-aside architectures that sit off a host CPU or NPU. This look-aside architecture requires a substantial number of host processor cycles to do packet parsing, classification, lookups and management for the traffic between the host and the security processor, so the host CPU or NPU becomes the performance bottleneck. Cavium's NITROX II with its built-in capability to sit in-line between the MAC and the host processor completely off-loads security processing from the host processor and eliminates this bottleneck.Cavium Networks Inc.