Chapter 1 Product Overview 5
Hardware Overview
The Sun Crypto Accelerator 4000 hardware is a full size (4.2 inches x 12.283 inches)
cryptographic accelerator PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter that enhances the
performance of IPsec and SSL on Sun servers.

IPsec Hardware Acceleration

The Sun Crypto Accelerator 4000 board encrypts and decrypts IPsec packets in
hardware,offloading this high-overhead operation from the SPARC™ processor.The
cryptographic hardware also supports general asymmetric and symmetric
cryptographic operations for use in other applications and contains a hardware
source of random numbers.
Note – No IPsec configuration or tuning is required to use the Sun Crypto
Accelerator 4000 board for IPsec acceleration. Yousimply install the Sun Crypto
Accelerator 4000 packages and reboot.
Oncethe Sun Crypto Accelerator 4000 boardand packages are installed, any existing
IPsec configuration and any future IPsec configuration will use the Sun Crypto
Accelerator 4000 board instead of the core Solaris software. The boardhandles any
supported IPsec algorithm listed in TABLE1-1. IPsec algorithms not supported by the
Sun Crypto Accelerator 4000 board will continue to be handled by the core Solaris
encryption software. The configuration of IPsec is documented in the System
Administration Guide of the Solaris System Administrator Collection at
http://docs.sun.com.