There's a pretty good technical introduction to ICSF published in z/Journal last year: http://www.zjournal.com/PDF/sarasin-may.pdf Note that, since that article, the z890 was introduced, and that model also has the hardware to support ICSF.
I understand that the 990 and 890 have special, new crypto-related instructions -- in addition to the PCI cards and CP Assist features -- that may offer some benefits for certain encryption algorithms and software. There's some more information here: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/483/slegel.html "Clear key" DES and Triple DES (3DES) benefit from the "on board" hardware (incl. CP Assist), while the various PCI cards can handle more algorithms. Choose your encryption algorithms carefully, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Generally the PCI cards are best suited for network-related encryption (MQ, HTTPS) and the on boards for storage-related encryption (tape, disk). None of this will be "free" -- there will be CP MIPS -- but the three levels of extra hardware assist can help, sometimes a lot. The analogy to ICSF in the Linux world is OpenSSL. If you've got the right kernel and OpenSSL version, and your Linux software is using OpenSSL, it should exploit the hardware appropriately. Not sure about TPF, VSE, and VM, but I think all of those OSes will exploit the hardware, too, in their own ways. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
