AX SERIES: HARDWARE SSL ACCELERATION

For HTTP-based services, SSL acceleration is one of the most applied applications of a load balancer. In the past, encryption and decryption were handled on individual Web servers in the server farm. This in turn led to performance and management issues.

Performance issues occurred due to the high number of encryption and decryption functions required, resulting in a large CPU hit, thus incurring the cost of additional servers. Management issues included having to manage a large number of certificates across tens, hundreds, or thousands of servers.

As the natural route through which traffic must pass before it can reach any Web server, certificate services have been moved to the load balancer as the de facto location for these services. This allows the load balancer to offer SSL termination, and HTTP forwarding to the backend Web servers. The AX Series also extends SSL offload to other TCP services, including LDAPS, POPS and now STARTTLS for secure email encryption and acceleration.

To ensure that the load balancer delivers optimal performance, the AX Series appliances have integrated ASIC chipsets for dedicated encryption/decryption capabilities, featuring the industry leading Cavium NITROX® Security Processor chipsets. This ensures the AX Series Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) and multi-core CPUs are free from bulk SSL transactions, and ready for other load balancing instructions.

In summary, using SSL acceleration allows CPU-intensive encrypted traffic required for Web transactions to be offloaded by the AX Series server load balancer. This reduces the number of servers required to support Web transactions, while at the same time increasing transaction speed so that more orders can be processed in the same amount of time.