Exar Expands Data Reduction and Security Card Product Family

FREMONT, Calif., May 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR) today expanded the Express DX 1800 family with the addition of the DX 1825 and DX 1835 data reduction and security cards.  The new cards are ideal for entry and midrange servers where cost per performance is a delicate balance.  The Express DX 1800 cards off-load compression and encryption, minimizing CPU cycles which can then be used to maintain higher performance, or enable more cost-effective systems, both of which lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the customer.

The trend to push cost and power efficient servers into the Enterprise is continuing at an increasing rate as IT departments work to gain control of their operating expenses.  It is an age-old battle for IT departments to manage growing volumes of data while being asked to watch costs.  Couple those requirements with the convergence of virtualization and cloud computing and the IT landscape changes even more dramatically.

"The industry is realizing that throwing more CPU cores in a system doesn't always provide the benefits their customers need," said Zack Mihalis, senior director of marketing, Datacom and Storage business unit at Exar. "More CPU cores increase power consumption and overall system costs without necessarily increasing or scaling performance. The Express DX 1800 family enables OEMs to reduce the number of CPU cores required to run their applications and still offer line-rate compression and encryption capabilities with minimal power consumption. The DX 1800 family also offers data integrity features that are unmatched in the industry such as real-time data verification with no performance impact or increased power consumption."

Exar has conducted numerous benchmarking tests comparing the DX 1800 products hardware-offload benefits to software implementations on industry-leading CPUs.  Both performance and power consumption were tested with the hardware-offload solution beating out the software solution significantly in most cases.  Exar has compiled the data and is making it available in "The Benefits of Hardware Acceleration Offload for Storage Appliances" whitepaper (requires registration).

About Express DX 1800 Family

The Express DX 1825 is a half-height, low power x8 PCI-Express 2 card providing up to 1.6 Gigabytes/second of encryption and/or compression throughput and typically consumes 9.5Watts.  The Express DX 1835 is a half-height, low power x8 PCI-Express 2 card that provides 2.4 Gigabytes/second of encryption and/or compression throughput and typically consumes 11.5Watts.  

The unique, single-pass, hardware architecture of the DX 1800 family allows simultaneous encryption, hashing, and compression of data in either packet or block form.  These operations, when done in software, need to be done serially, further increasing host CPU utilization.  The host CPU load required to manage the DX 1800 family in a dual socket x86 server is typically up to 3%.

Data integrity and availability are critical concerns for the Enterprise.  The DX 1800 family offers end-to-end data integrity to ensure any data path errors are identified and reported.  At a higher level, results from operations performed by the cards are verified in real time without impacting performance – a capability that can reduce throughput of software-based approaches by 50% or more.  To ensure high availability, the Express DX 1800 family enables failover to Exar's SDK software in the event of a system I/O hardware failure enabling functionality to be maintained until the system can be serviced.

The Express DX 1800 family supports a range of protocols.  For encryption and authentication, offloads for a range of AES modes are supported with hardware offload for the National Security Agency's (NSA) Suite B algorithms including Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).  The DX 1800 family also supports hardware-based lossless compression such as LZS, eLZS, and GZIP protocols.  The SDK, for the Express DX 1800 family, provides a full set of APIs to easily integrate these functions into both Linux and Windows software environments.  Support for OpenSSL and OpenSwan is also provided.  For more information, please visit Express DX 1800 family.

Availability

The Express DX 1825 and DX 1835 cards are sampling to customers now with production available next quarter.  For inquires or evaluation requests please contact your local Exar sales representative or contact us online.

About Exar

Exar Corporation delivers highly differentiated silicon, software and subsystem solutions for industrial, datacom and storage applications.  For over 40 years, Exar's comprehensive knowledge of end-user markets along with the underlying analog, mixed signal and digital technology has enabled innovative solutions that meet the needs of the evolving connected world.   Exar's product portfolio includes power management and interface components, communications products, storage optimization solutions, network security and applied service processors.  Exar has locations worldwide providing real-time customer support to drive rapid product development.  For more information about Exar, visit: http://www.exar.com.

SOURCE Exar Corporation