GOVERNMENT

With data security more critically important than ever, the challenge is to protect data without creating access bottlenecks. Silicon Graphics and ERUCES Inc. announced today at the AFCEA TechNet conference (Booth #209) a complement of 64-bit technologies that, when compared to traditional 32-bit options, is capable of reducing cryptographic-induced data latencies by nearly eight times. This level of access and protection is vital to enterprises where performance, latency, reliability and cost are essential, such as in the Intelligence, Department of Defense, and Homeland Security sectors. The SGI Altix 350 server running ERUCES Encryption Framework for Enterprises (EFE) product suite creates a security shield for data residing in enterprise environments. For developers EFE provides reusable tools and modules for encrypting files or databases to secure systems of any size, from small-scale to complex, multi-platform deployments. "From general email transactions to accessing critical government data, few users can afford delayed information -- while at the same time no user can afford to compromise that data for the sake of expedience," said W. Thomas Stanley, director, Intelligence and Homeland Security, SGI Federal. "With EFE and Altix the security-minded user has a very fast and scalable solution that can effectively protect critical data." "Traditionally many organizations have hesitated to deploy encryption-based security solutions because of the increased overhead incurred," said Oggy Vasic, vice president for software development, ERUCES. "Recent test results have verified that running a centralized Tricryption Key Server on the Altix server will yield tremendous performance. We expect these results will inspire organizations to evaluate how encryption can help solve their information assurance problems." Blazing Transactions per Second During performance testing of the ERUCES EFE V product suite running on the Altix 350 server at SGI's Global Benchmark Center in Mountain View, Calif., performance peaked at more than 6,000 cryptographic (encrypt/decrypt) transactions per second. This is an improvement of nearly eight times the performance previously achieved using the same methodology in ERUCES test labs on a 32-bit processor-based system. The Altix 350 server was configured with two Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz/6MB cache processors and 2GB of RAM running a standard 64-bit Linux operating environment distribution. These results -- in particular running on a two-processor system -- are significant because it demonstrates that an enterprise implementation can be achieved in even the most demanding and extended-use cases without mission-impacting data access latencies. Additional information on SGI Altix 350 and ERUCES Encryption Framework for Enterprises can be found at www.sgi.com/Altix/350 and www.eruces.com/EFE respectively.