Exar Launches High-Performance, Enterprise-Class, Data Security and Reduction Card

FREMONT, Calif., Dec. 6, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR) today announced the Express DX 1845 high-performance data security and reduction card.  The DX 1845 provides a simple, power-efficient solution to secure and optimize data in enterprise applications.  The new data security and reduction card offloads these tasks from the host microprocessor, freeing up valuable cycles to be applied to the application workload or reducing the type or number of microprocessors needed.  By reducing the number of additional microprocessors needed the DX 1845 helps customers with power, cooling and capital expenditures, enabling a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

With the adoption of cloud computing, and increased requirements around protecting information, security is no longer just an issue to be handled in firewalls at the edge of the data center but needs to be addressed throughout the data center.  In addition, the amount of unstructured data being processed by and stored in these data centers is increasing rapidly, putting a strain on storage infrastructure.  

"The expanding digital universe is driving the migration to the cloud as customers are looking for efficient solutions to store, secure, distribute and manage large amounts of data," said Zack Mihalis, senior director of marketing, Datacom and Storage business unit at Exar. "The Express DX 1845 provides security and data reduction capabilities with the performance, scalability, and power-efficiency required for enterprise environments.  It can simultaneously compress and encrypt data at rates several times faster than two 6 core/12 thread enterprise class x86 processors at a fraction of the power consumption."

Additionally, as more and more information moves to a digital format (i.e. medical records, online buying and associated habits), it is tagged and stored in databases. These databases are sizeable and the information highly confidential.  The Express DX 1845 card offers customers the highest-level of encryption and industry-standard, lossless compression features, which can significantly increase security while reducing costly primary storage capacity requirements and optimizing network bandwidth.

About Express DX 1845

The Express DX 1845 is a half-height, low power x8 PCI-Express 2 add-in card solution that provides up to 3.2 Gigabytes/second of encryption and/or compression throughput, consuming less than 14 Watts.  The unique, single-pass, hardware architecture 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 loading.  The host CPU load required to manage the DX 1845 in a dual socket x86 server is typically only 2 to 4%.

Data integrity and availability are critical concerns for the enterprise.  The DX 1845 card 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 card 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 1845 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 1845 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 1845 supports hardware-based lossless compression and decompression with LZS, eLZS, and GZIP protocols.  The Express DX 1845 SDK 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 1845.

Availability

The DX 1845 card is sampling to customers now with production available later this month.  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 nearly 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.

Editors Note:  Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) — Protected by Certicom Corp.'s registered patents.  Additional patent applications pending.

SOURCE Exar Corporation