While difficult to balance, speed and security are prerequisite for effective e-commerce. Intel has delivered an attractive solution with the NetStructure 7110 eCommerce Accelerator that allows a combination of fast page downloads and bulletproof security.
Darryl Squara, product manager for Intel at Tarsus Technologies, declares that the new NetStructure 7110 was designed to give Web site speed by accelerating Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions without sacrificing security.
"SSL was developed in 1994 to provide the security required for conducting e-commerce, but the price for this security reduced Web server performance," explains Squara. "With the NetStructure 7110 Intel has managed to circumvent this problem by designing a drop-in appliance server that solely handles the task of SSL connection processing."
An SSL connection consists of an SSL handshake followed by cipher negotiation and generation. The next step in an SSL transaction is bulk encryption and decryption of the client request, which is followed by the server response. SSL acceleration removes the SSL handshake, cipher negotiation and generation, and the encryption/decryption burden from the Web server.
Tests conducted by Network World USA showed that the NetStructure 7110 appliance - capable of processing up to 200 secure connections per second - handles the task of removing the SSL overhead burden from the Web server very well, increasing the performance of secure transactions by 80% over the baseline configuration.
"The NetStructure 7110 works by decrypting the client SSL packet before it reaches the Web server, reducing demand on CPU power from the server. Once processed, the packet is re-encrypted by the NetStructure 7110 and sent back to the client," continues Squara.
Various Web server environments including Apache, Microsoft and Netscape support Intel`s NetStructure 7110. Operating systems supported include Unix and Windows NT. The plethora of security algorithms supported by the appliance include RSA, RC2, RC4, RC5, DSA, Data Encryption Standard, Triple-DES, International Data Encryptions Algorithm, CAST, CAST5, Blowfish, MD5, MDC2, RMD-160, SHA and SHA-1.
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