Anyone know where to get Exar VPN Crypto cards?
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Ive seen a lot of talk about other crypto cards, which seem to have really low throughput (a number appear to be bested by a sandy-bridge Xeon on one core) and are PCI; Ive also seen talk of the Exar DX 1700 series (http://www.exar.com/Common/Content/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=10200&ParentID=251), which is PCIe and has very good (multi-gbit) throughput, but actually finding one is a challenge.
Im currently trying to get one of their distributors to get me a quote, but was wondering if anyone else had any luck finding one for purchase?
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Nope, let me know if you find one, what the price is, and whether or not it works in pfSense.
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A different, but related, issue is the support of AES-NI acceleration, which is included in recent FreeBSD releases http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/crypto/aesni/ and promises ~4x speed for AES128/256
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Yes, I saw that, but there arent any 1w intel processors that support AES-NI ;) Plus, in theory, the Hifn-based cards are supported now, not in 1 year (as is the case with AES-NI).
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Not sure if it's really worth spending extra money on a dedicated crypto card unless you are pumping out several 100Mb+ VPN connections. Eventually most newer CPUs will have this built-in.
Xeons should handle large VPN bandwidth easily. Also software crypto are easier to update with newer ones if it ever gets broken or hacked.
Darkk