Customer Profile
• Any business that is serious about securing their
web and email traffic be it from an internal or
external threat, is a prime candidate for the
Alteon SSL Accelerator (ASA)
• Large government organisations, to companies
providing e-Commerce or B2B services, who
require encryption and/or authentication of their
data without impacting the customer experience,
will require the deployment of the Alteon SSL
Accelerator (ASA)
The rich features of content switching are not
compromised when security is required as
fully-fledged intelligent switching is still achieved by
using an Alteon Web Switch in conjunction with the
SSL Accelerator. In addition securing of email
services that support SSMTP, POP3S and IMAPS can
be easily achieved using the Accelerator.
Typical Applications
Today’s most successful companies are using the
Web to communicate with their customers,
suppliers and partners because of the open and
ubiquitous nature of the Internet. But the very
openness of the Web makes security a concern. SSL,
combined with PKI, can provide a standard means of
securing transactions, but each has possible
drawbacks to your site’s performance and resources.
SSL transactions can be so compute-intensive that
they slow your site to crawl as Web servers are
forced to handle key exchanges and bulk encryption.
And PKI can take a toll in administration. The Alteon
SSL Accelerator (ASA) has been specifically designed
and enhanced to work with Nortel Networks
industry leading Alteon Web Switch, to create a total
solution that allows you to ensure security for you
and your customers and to manage key
administration centrally, all without losing the site
performance that is truly critical to success. So one
can enjoy the performance one needs with the
strong security customers demand at a much lower
cost than adding more servers, all in a highly
scalable solution that is easy to integrate.
On line shopping and eBusiness services are the
main applications that would benefit from this
technology however as more emphasis is placed on
security, internal and non-web based sites are being
migrated to SSL to provide superior encryption and
security.
Alteon SSL Accelerator (ASA) 81
Alteon SSL Accelerator (ASA)Overview
The Alteon SSL Accelerator (ASA)is an innovative service delivery platform designed to provide a variety of
value added traffic management applications that further extend the performance, scalability and flexibility
of advanced Content Switching infrastructures. The Alteon SSL Accelerator (ASA) intelligently accelerates
secure business transactions by offloading Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) processing from local servers without
imposing delays on other traffic in the same data path. The SSL Accelerator also simplifies the way to deploy
and maintain a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), enabling business critical electronic transactions. Purpose-
built to perform processing tasks with long duty-cycles that would otherwise bog down network performance,
the SSL Accelerator seamlessly integrates with Alteon Content Switches to offer the best of Content Switching
and IP appliance technologies.