Cavium's New Security Chip

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Cavium Networks, the cost and performance leader in security processing today announced that it is shipping the NITROX Lite family of processors and the NITROX XL line of PCI and PCI-X acceleration boards. NITROX Lite is a family of single chip security processing solutions that include packet processing, symmetric and asymmetric encryption at performance from 100Mbps up to 1Gbps with 1K to 7K RSA operations per second of IPsec or SSL protocol processing. The NITROX XL line of PCI and PCI-X cards support performance ranges from 100Mbps to 2Gbps of IPsec or SSL processing with 1K to 50K RSA operations per second. The NITROX Security Processor family and NITROX XL acceleration boards are both being used by OEM vendors in a wide range of networking equipment to accelerate security applications like IPsec VPNs, SSL VPNs, web-servers, load balancers, content switches, application firewalls, wireless gateways and routers.

All of Cavium’s NITROX products support the full range of bulk encryption and hashing algorithms (DES, 3DES, AES, ARC4, SHA1, MD5), public key processing algorithms (RSA and Diffie-Hellman), and complete IPsec Packet or SSL record processing. The NITROX Lite processors are 100% software compatible with Cavium’s flagship NITROX processor family and are pin compatible with its 256BGA package ensuring seamless upgrade capability. Cavium’s NITROX Lite also comes with complete application software, middleware, low-level driver software code and extensive solution level support. Cavium also offers plug and play software support for the world’s most popular web servers, Linux Apache and MicroSoft’s IIS and popular IPsec stacks such as SSH and Linux FreeS/WAN.

"With the addition of the new NITROX Lite processors, Cavium’s software-compatible NITROX family now spans all of the popular performance points, with scalability to ultra-high performance as needed," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group. "The breadth and strong price/performance of these products will enable greater deployment of security-enabled networking equipment. Cavium's powerful products, established customer base, and ongoing roadmap position the company as a key player in the security processor market."

Pricing and Availability

All members of the NITROX Lite family are currently shipping in the 256PBGA package. The NITROX Lite processors are priced from $35 to $85 in 1K quantities. The NITROX Lite Evaluation Kit is available at $3995, which includes middleware, drivers and an evaluation board with a PCI card form factor. The NITROX acceleration boards are available in production quantities now. The NITROX acceleration boards are priced from $295 to $995 in volume depending on processor / performance option.

Cavium Networks