Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.[GPU acceleration of ZFS]
-Original Message- From: David Magda [mailto:dma...@ee.ryerson.ca] Sent: 星期二, 六月 28, 2011 10:41 To: Fred Liu Cc: Bill Sommerfeld; ZFS Discuss Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.[GPU acceleration of ZFS] On Jun 27, 2011, at 22:03, Fred Liu wrote: FYI There is another thread named -- GPU acceleration of ZFS in this list to discuss the possibility to utilize the power of GPGPU. I posted here: In a similar vein I recently came across SSLShader: http://shader.kaist.edu/sslshader/ http://www.usenix.org/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Jang.pdf http://www.google.com/search?q=sslshader This could be handy for desktops doing ZFS crypto (and even browser SSL and/or SSH), but few servers have decent graphics cards (and SPARC systems don't even have video ports by :). Agree. The most challenging part is coding as long as there is an empty PCIE slot in server. Thanks. Fred ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
Thanks for this pointer ... I have been looking for a small (low power) server for a bit now and did not realize that HP had anything in the line below the ML-1xx. One of the reviews at the HP site note that the 5.25 media bay is IDE only (from a BIOS perspective), can you confirm or deny this ? I really want 6 drives (2 x 250 GB OS, 4 x 1 TB data), and using the 5.25 bay plus the eSata I can get there. Although if I can use a couple 16 GB USB flash drives for OS I *might* go that route. I am not planning on using encryption, so the CPU is probably not a limitation for me. On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Roberto Waltman li...@rwaltman.com wrote: I recently bought an HP Proliant Microserver for a home file server. ( pics and more here: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=20968192 ) I installed 5 1.5TB (5900 RPM) drives, upgraded the memory to 8GB, and installed Solaris 11 Express without a hitch. A few simple tests using dd with 1gb and 2gb files showed excellent transfer rates: ~200 MB/sec on a 5 drive raidz2 pool, ~310 MB/sec on a five drive pool with no redundancy. That is, until I enabled encryption, which brought the transfer rates down to around 20 MB/sec... -- {1-2-3-4-5-6-7-} Paul Kraus - Senior Systems Architect, Garnet River ( http://www.garnetriver.com/ ) - Sound Coordinator, Schenectady Light Opera Company ( http://www.sloctheater.org/ ) - Technical Advisor, RPI Players ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Jun 27, 2011, at 17:16, Erik Trimble wrote: Think about how things were done with the i386 and i387. That's what I'm= after. With modern CPU buses like AMD Intel support, plopping a co-pro= cessor into another CPU socket would really, really help. Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be= simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general C= PUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. One of the VIA processors was one of the first with specific random and AES instructions. AMD Intel have followed suite and your can some information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set (Similar instructions have been added for SHA, MD5 (older CPUs), RSA, though typically using building blocks not a single long running instruction) A number of the crypto accelerators were much slower than the implementation of a direct implementation in opcodes; one issue, though, what register sets will be used and where will it be saved when the thread is preempted (I'm assuming that the reason why AMD and Intel use different instructions from VIA is possibly because of such details. The current implementation the T3 uses a co-processor (one per core, I think) Casper ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On 06/27/11 11:32 PM, Bill Sommerfeld wrote: On 06/27/11 15:24, David Magda wrote: Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general CPUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set Present in many current Intel CPUs; also expected to be present in AMD's Bulldozer based CPUs. I recall seeing a blog comparing the existing Solaris hand-tuned AES assembler performance with the (then) new AES instruction version, where the Intel AES instructions only got you about a 30% performance increase. I've seen reports of better performance improvements, but usually by comparing with the performance on older processors which are going to be slower for additional reasons then just missing the AES instructions. Also, you could claim better performance improvement if you compared against a less efficient original implementation of AES. What this means is that a faster CPU may buy you more crypto performance than the AES instructions alone will do. My understanding from reading the Intel AES instruction set (which I warn might not be completely correct) is that the AES encryption/decryption instruction is executed between 10 and 14 times (depending on key length) for each 128 bits (16 bytes) of data being encrypted/decrypted, so it's very much part of the regular instruction pipeline. The code will have to loop though this process multiple times to process a data block bigger than 16 bytes, i.e. a double nested loop, although I expect it's normally loop-unrolled a fair degree for optimisation purposes. Conversely, the crypto units in the T-series processors are separate from the CPU, and do the encryption/decryption whilst the CPU is getting on with something else, and they do it much faster than it could be done on the CPU. Small blocks are normally a problem for crypto offload engines because the overhead of farming off the work to the engine and getting the result back often means that you can do the crypto on the CPU faster than the time it takes to get the crypto engine started and stopped. However, T-series crypto is particularly good at handling small blocks efficiently, such as around 1kbyte which you are likely to find in a network packet, as it is much closer coupled to the CPU than a PCI crypto card can be, and performance with small packets was key for the crypto networking support T-series was designed for. Of course, it handles crypto of large blocks just fine too. -- Andrew ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
All (Ultra)SPARC T2, T2+, and T3 CPUs should have these capabilities; if you have some other CPU the capabilities are probably not present. Run 'prtdiag | head -20' to see the CPUs on your system/s; run cryptoadm(1M) with the list option (Solaris 10+) to see the software and hardware providers available. For further assistance your best bet would be crypto-discuss (this has gotten OT for zfs-discuss): http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/crypto-discuss/ Thanks, I'll ask over there. I understood there was a broadcomm add on card for servers but from your answer it seems the CPU supports crypto operations. I don't understand what the purpose of having both support it is if they want to sell crypto cards. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
[zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
I recently bought an HP Proliant Microserver for a home file server. ( pics and more here: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=20968192 ) I installed 5 1.5TB (5900 RPM) drives, upgraded the memory to 8GB, and installed Solaris 11 Express without a hitch. A few simple tests using dd with 1gb and 2gb files showed excellent transfer rates: ~200 MB/sec on a 5 drive raidz2 pool, ~310 MB/sec on a five drive pool with no redundancy. That is, until I enabled encryption, which brought the transfer rates down to around 20 MB/sec... Obviously the CPU is the bottleneck here, and I?m wondering what to do next. I can split the storage into file systems with and without encryption and allocate data accordingly. No need, for example, to encrypt open source code, or music. But I would like to have everything encrypted by default. My concern is not industrial espionage from a hacker in Belarus, but having a disk fail and send it for repair with my credit card statements easily readable on it, etc. I am new to (open or closed)Solaris. I found there is something called the Encryption Framework, and that there is hardware support for encryption. This server has two unused PCI-e slots, so I thought a card could be the solution, but the few I found seem to be geared to protect SSH and VPN connections, etc., not the file system. Cost is a factor also. I could build a similar server with a much faster processor for a few hundred dollars more, so a $1000 dollar card for a $1000 file server is not a reasonable option. Is there anything out there I could use? Thanks, Roberto Waltman ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
IMO a faster processor with built-in AES and other crypto support is most likely to give you the most bang for your buck, particularly if you're using closed Solaris 11, as Solaris engineering is likely to add support for new crypto instructions faster than Illumos (but I don't really know enough about Illumos to say for sure). Nico -- ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On 6/27/2011 9:55 AM, Roberto Waltman wrote: I recently bought an HP Proliant Microserver for a home file server. ( pics and more here: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=20968192 ) I installed 5 1.5TB (5900 RPM) drives, upgraded the memory to 8GB, and installed Solaris 11 Express without a hitch. A few simple tests using dd with 1gb and 2gb files showed excellent transfer rates: ~200 MB/sec on a 5 drive raidz2 pool, ~310 MB/sec on a five drive pool with no redundancy. That is, until I enabled encryption, which brought the transfer rates down to around 20 MB/sec... Obviously the CPU is the bottleneck here, and I?m wondering what to do next. I can split the storage into file systems with and without encryption and allocate data accordingly. No need, for example, to encrypt open source code, or music. But I would like to have everything encrypted by default. My concern is not industrial espionage from a hacker in Belarus, but having a disk fail and send it for repair with my credit card statements easily readable on it, etc. I am new to (open or closed)Solaris. I found there is something called the Encryption Framework, and that there is hardware support for encryption. This server has two unused PCI-e slots, so I thought a card could be the solution, but the few I found seem to be geared to protect SSH and VPN connections, etc., not the file system. Cost is a factor also. I could build a similar server with a much faster processor for a few hundred dollars more, so a $1000 dollar card for a $1000 file server is not a reasonable option. Is there anything out there I could use? Thanks, Roberto Waltman You're out of luck. The hardware-encryption device is seen as a small market by the vendors, and they price accordingly. All the solutions are FIPS-compliant, which makes them non-trivially expensive to build/test/verify. I have yet to see the basic crypto accelerator - which should be as simple as an FPGA with downloadable (and updateable) firmware. The other major cost point is the crypto plugins - sadly, there is no way to simply have the CPU farm off crypto jobs to a co-processor. That is, there's no way for the CPU to go oh, that looks like I'm running a crypto algorithm - I should hand it over to the crypto co-processor. Instead, you have to write custom plugin/drivers/libraries for each OS, and pray that each OS has some standardized crypto framework. Otherwise, you have to link apps with custom libraries. I'm always kind of surprised that there hasn't been a movement to create standardized crypto commands, like the various FP-specific commands that are part of MMX/SSE/etc. That way, most of this could be done in hardware seamlessly. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Mon, June 27, 2011 15:24, Erik Trimble wrote: [...] I'm always kind of surprised that there hasn't been a movement to create standardized crypto commands, like the various FP-specific commands that are part of MMX/SSE/etc. That way, most of this could be done in hardware seamlessly. The (Ultra)SPARC T-series processors do, but to a certain extent it goes against a CPU manufacturers best (financial) interest to provide this: crypto is very CPU intensive using 'regular' instructions, so if you need to do a lot of it, it would force you to purchase a manufacturer's top-of-the-line CPUs, and to have as many sockets as you can to handle a load (and presumably you need to do useful work besides just en/decrypting traffic). If you have special instructions that do the operations efficiently, it means that you're not chewing up cycles as much, so a less powerful (and cheaper) processor can be purchased. I'm sure all the Web 2.0 companies would love to have these (and OpenSSL link use the instructions), so they could simply enable HTTPS for everything. (Of course it'd also be helpful for data-at-rest, on-disk encryption as well.) The last benchmarks I saw indicated that the SPARC T-series could do 45 Gb/s AES or some such, with gobs of RSA operations as well. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On 6/27/2011 1:13 PM, David Magda wrote: On Mon, June 27, 2011 15:24, Erik Trimble wrote: [...] I'm always kind of surprised that there hasn't been a movement to create standardized crypto commands, like the various FP-specific commands that are part of MMX/SSE/etc. That way, most of this could be done in hardware seamlessly. The (Ultra)SPARC T-series processors do, but to a certain extent it goes against a CPU manufacturers best (financial) interest to provide this: crypto is very CPU intensive using 'regular' instructions, so if you need to do a lot of it, it would force you to purchase a manufacturer's top-of-the-line CPUs, and to have as many sockets as you can to handle a load (and presumably you need to do useful work besides just en/decrypting traffic). If you have special instructions that do the operations efficiently, it means that you're not chewing up cycles as much, so a less powerful (and cheaper) processor can be purchased. I'm sure all the Web 2.0 companies would love to have these (and OpenSSL link use the instructions), so they could simply enable HTTPS for everything. (Of course it'd also be helpful for data-at-rest, on-disk encryption as well.) The last benchmarks I saw indicated that the SPARC T-series could do 45 Gb/s AES or some such, with gobs of RSA operations as well The T-series crypto isn't what I'm thinking of. AFAIK, you still need to use the Crypto framework in Solaris to access the on-chip functionality. Which makes the T-series no different than CPUs without a crypto module but a crypto add-in board instead. What I'm thinking of is something on the lines of what AMD proposed awhile ago, in combination with how we used to handle hardware that had FP optional. That is, you continue to make CPUs without any crypto functionality, EXCEPT that they support certain extensions a la MMX. If no Crypto accelerator was available, the CPU would trap any Crypto calls, and force them to done in software. You could then stick a crypto accellerator in a second CPU socket, and the CPU would recognized this was there, and pipe crypto calls to the dedicated co-processor. Think about how things were done with the i386 and i387. That's what I'm after. With modern CPU buses like AMD Intel support, plopping a co-processor into another CPU socket would really, really help. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Jun 27, 2011, at 17:16, Erik Trimble wrote: Think about how things were done with the i386 and i387. That's what I'm after. With modern CPU buses like AMD Intel support, plopping a co-processor into another CPU socket would really, really help. Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general CPUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. There's more and more sensitive data out there, so on-disk crypto could be deployed in more places to help prevent data loss (on both servers and desktops/laptops), and those systems that don't do disk IO probably do network IO, and so would be helped from a TLS/SSL/SSH perspective. If I were AMD I'd seriously be thinking about this, as it'd help boost volume and mindshare for a little while with all the folks doing any kind of web activity would pick up kit for HTTPS—at least until Intel brought out a similar thing. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On 06/27/11 15:24, David Magda wrote: Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general CPUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set Present in many current Intel CPUs; also expected to be present in AMD's Bulldozer based CPUs. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Jun 27, 2011, at 18:32, Bill Sommerfeld wrote: On 06/27/11 15:24, David Magda wrote: Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general CPUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set Present in many current Intel CPUs; also expected to be present in AMD's Bulldozer based CPUs. Now compare that with the T-series stuff that also handles 3DES, RC4, RSA2048, DSA, DH, ECC, MD5, SHA1, SHA2, as well as a hardware RNG: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20100920_sparc_t3_pk11rsaperf The initial TLS/SSL set up is actually the expensive part (20-58% of the time spent of the 'transaction'), and that AES can be performed decently even on non-AESNI CPUs: simply adding an RSA accelerator can double performance without session caching, and even ~20% with it. SSL session caching alone can help improve throughput by a factor of more than two. Performance Analysis of TLS Web Servers http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/tls-tocs.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.16.1403 AESNI is certain better than nothing, but RSA, SHA, and the RNG would be nice as well. It'd also be handy for ZFS crypto in addition to all the network IO stuff. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.[GPU acceleration of ZFS]
FYI There is another thread named -- GPU acceleration of ZFS in this list to discuss the possibility to utilize the power of GPGPU. I posted here: Good day, I think ZFS can take advantage of using GPU for sha256 calculation, encryption and maybe compression. Modern video card, like 5xxx or 6xxx ATI HD Series can do calculation of sha256 50-100 times faster than modern 4 cores CPU. kgpu project for linux shows nice results. 'zfs scrub' would work freely on high performance ZFS pools. The only problem that there is no AMD/Nvidia drivers for Solaris that support hardware-assisted OpenCL. Is anyone interested in it? Best regards, Anatoly Legkodymov. On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Anatoly legko...@fastmail.fm wrote: Good day, I think ZFS can take advantage of using GPU for sha256 calculation, encryption and maybe compression. Modern video card, like 5xxx or 6xxx ATI HD Series can do calculation of sha256 50-100 times faster than modern 4 cores CPU. Ignoring optimizations from SIMD extensions like SSE and friends, this is probably true. However, the GPU also has to deal with the overhead of data transfer to itself before it can even begin crunching data. Granted, a Gen. 2 x16 link is quite speedy, but is CPU performance really that poor where a GPU can still out-perform it? My undergrad thesis dealt with computational acceleration utilizing CUDA, and the datasets had to scale quite a ways before there was a noticeable advantage in using a Tesla or similar over a bog-standard i7-920. The only problem that there is no AMD/Nvidia drivers for Solaris that support hardware-assisted OpenCL. This, and keep in mind that most of the professional users here will likely be using professional hardware, where a simple 8MB Rage XL gets the job done thanks to the magic of out-of-band management cards and other such facilities. Even as a home user, I have not placed a high-end videocard into my machine, I use a $5 ATI PCI videocard that saw about a hour of use whilst I installed Solaris 11. -- --khd IMHO, zfs need to run in all kind of HW T-series CMT server that can help sha calculation since T1 day, did not see any work in ZFS to take advantage it On 5/10/2011 11:29 AM, Anatoly wrote: Good day, I think ZFS can take advantage of using GPU for sha256 calculation, encryption and maybe compression. Modern video card, like 5xxx or 6xxx ATI HD Series can do calculation of sha256 50-100 times faster than modern 4 cores CPU. kgpu project for linux shows nice results. 'zfs scrub' would work freely on high performance ZFS pools. The only problem that there is no AMD/Nvidia drivers for Solaris that support hardware-assisted OpenCL. Is anyone interested in it? Best regards, Anatoly Legkodymov. On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Anatoly legko...@fastmail.fm wrote: Good day, I think ZFS can take advantage of using GPU for sha256 calculation, encryption and maybe compression. Modern video card, like 5xxx or 6xxx ATI HD Series can do calculation of sha256 50-100 times faster than modern 4 cores CPU. kgpu project for linux shows nice results. 'zfs scrub' would work freely on high performance ZFS pools. The only problem that there is no AMD/Nvidia drivers for Solaris that support hardware-assisted OpenCL. Is anyone interested in it? This isn't technically true. The NVIDIA drivers support compute, but there's other parts of the toolchain missing. /* I don't know about ATI/AMD, but I'd guess they likely don't support compute across platforms */ /* Disclaimer - The company I work for has a working HMPP compiler for Solaris/FreeBSD and we may soon support CUDA */ On 10 May 2011, at 16:44, Hung-Sheng Tsao (LaoTsao) Ph. D. wrote: IMHO, zfs need to run in all kind of HW T-series CMT server that can help sha calculation since T1 day, did not see any work in ZFS to take advantage it That support would be in the crypto framework though, not ZFS per se. So I think the OP might consider how best to add GPU support to the crypto framework. Chris ___ Thanks. Fred -Original Message- From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss- boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of David Magda Sent: 星期二, 六月 28, 2011 9:23 To: Bill Sommerfeld Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations. On Jun 27, 2011, at 18:32, Bill Sommerfeld wrote: On 06/27/11 15:24, David Magda wrote: Given the amount of transistors that are available nowadays I think it'd be simpler to just create a series of SIMD instructions right in/on general CPUs, and skip the whole co-processor angle. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set Present in many current Intel CPUs; also expected to be present in AMD's Bulldozer based CPUs. Now compare that with the T-series stuff that also handles 3DES, RC4, RSA2048, DSA, DH, ECC, MD5
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.[GPU acceleration of ZFS]
On Jun 27, 2011, at 22:03, Fred Liu wrote: FYI There is another thread named -- GPU acceleration of ZFS in this list to discuss the possibility to utilize the power of GPGPU. I posted here: In a similar vein I recently came across SSLShader: http://shader.kaist.edu/sslshader/ http://www.usenix.org/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Jang.pdf http://www.google.com/search?q=sslshader This could be handy for desktops doing ZFS crypto (and even browser SSL and/or SSH), but few servers have decent graphics cards (and SPARC systems don't even have video ports by :). ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Jun 27, 2011 9:24 PM, David Magda dma...@ee.ryerson.ca wrote: AESNI is certain better than nothing, but RSA, SHA, and the RNG would be nice as well. It'd also be handy for ZFS crypto in addition to all the network IO stuff. The most important reason for AES-NI might be not performance but defeating side-channel attacks. Also, really fast AES HW makes AES-based hash functions quite tempting. No, AES-NI is nothing to sneeze at. Nico -- ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Encryption accelerator card recommendations.
On Jun 27, 2011 4:15 PM, David Magda dma...@ee.ryerson.ca wrote: The (Ultra)SPARC T-series processors do, but to a certain extent it goes against a CPU manufacturers best (financial) interest to provide this: crypto is very CPU intensive using 'regular' instructions, so if you need to do a lot of it, it would force you to purchase a manufacturer's top-of-the-line CPUs, and to have as many sockets as you can to handle a load (and presumably you need to do useful work besides just en/decrypting traffic). I hope no CPU vendor thinks about the economics of chip making that way. I actually doubt any do. Nico -- ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss