Glenn Brunette's Security Weblog


Sun SPARC Enterprise T5x20s: A Security Geeks Point of View

Tuesday Oct 09, 2007

What an exciting day! Today, Sun has officially launches the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 rack-mount systems along with the Sun Blade T6320 blade server, the first to be designed for the UltraSPARC T2 processor. From the point of view of a security geek, there is a lot to be happy about. The UltraSPARC T2 has support for eight (8) cryptographic processing units, each of which supports ten (10) different cryptographic algorithms and a hardware-based random number generator. Lawrence has done a fantastic job of talking about these capabilities and performance if you are interested. It is simply mind blowing.

So, what else is new? Well, we now have actual servers that can leverage the computing power of these chips. This means that companies can now begin to rethink about how they have deployed cryptography in their environments. In particular, it is now much more practical to deploy cryptographic services more widely across an enterprise environment due to the performance gains achieved by offloading the work to the cryptographic processing units. For example, why not ensure that all of your internal web, directory and mail services are fitted for encryption? (Hint: you should be doing this already, but now you can do it while not sacrificing the performance of your CPUs!) Net-net: strong security + excellent performance + eco-friendly is a win-win for everyone.

In addition to enabling the wider use of cryptographic services, I would also encourage any organization to consider how the performance and power benefits of these systems can be applied to their existing environments and workloads. In particular, when used in concert with Sun's Logical Domains (LDoms) technology, organizations can get the benefits of performance, virtualization and security together in one system. Did I mention that today we are also announcing version 1.0.1 of our LDoms technology? Honglin has all the details. Of particular interest to us security geeks is the support for minimized and hardened logical domains! Combine that with the security isolation capabilities of the LDoms hypervisor, a boat-load of crypto performance, and a rock-solid, security, and scalable operating system - you just can't go wrong.

Talk about "zero cost security"! Taken as a whole, you get all of the performance (did I mention the 64 threads?), power and virtualization benefits with security just baked into the design! What's not to like? At least from where this security geek is standing, the view is simply unbeatable. See it all for yourself!

Glenn

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Posted at 01:28PM Oct 09, 2007 by gbrunett in General Security Tags: