This knowledge base article describes how to configure SSL-Explorer to work with the nFast LN1200 acceleration card from nCipher. Details on the LN1200 card can be found at the nCipher website "http://www.ncipher.com/cryptographic_hardware/ssl_acceleration/22/nfast/".

Prior to making any modifications to the SSL-Explorer configuration it is necessary to install the LN1200 card. This is covered comprehensively in the documentation provided by nCipher.

Once the SSL acceleration card has been installed there are a few changes that need to be made to the SSL-Explorer configuration that will then off-load SSL tasks to the acceleration card.

The first file that will need to be changed for the SSL-Explorer configuration is the [SSL-Explorer installation directory]confwebserver.properties file need to be modified to have the following values.

webserver.port=80

webserver.protocol=http

As SSL-Explorer is no longer performing the SSL encryption it only needs to pass/receive plain text to/from the SSL Acceleration card. The SSL Acceleration card is where all encyption and decryption now occurs.

The following line needs to be added to the [SSL-Explorer installation directory]confsystem.properties file.

jetty.force.HTTPSRedirect=true

This line tells SSL-Explorer to redirect the HTTPS traffic to the SSL acceleration card.

Once these changes have been made SSL traffic will be handled by the acceleration card and not by SSL-Explorer.

The performance of the card can be improved even further by the use of BEA Systems JRockit Java JRE. This is simply due to this JRE being optimised for Enterprise Java performance. More information on the JRockit JRE is available in this knowledge base article "http://3sp.com/kb/idx/92/266".

The chart below should give an indication of the type of performance changes you can expect when using the acceleration card under a number of different configurations.