ICSF uses state-of-the-art hardware to improve performance of DES, AES, and PKA calculations. Both cryptographic coprocessor and cryptographic accelerator hardware is used by ICSF. The PCIXCC, CEX2C, CEX3C, CEX4C, and CEX5C coprocessors and PCICA, CEX2A, CEX3A, CEX4A, and CEX5A accelerators are referred as Cryptographic Features. This can remove limitations on the growth of your installation and enable it to use cryptography in high-transaction-rate applications. ICSF also improves performance by exploiting z/OS and by using an in-storage copy of the CKDS and PKDS. Maintaining DES, AES or PKA cryptographic keys in a protected data space (in addition to a data set) improves performance and availability by reducing requirements for read access to cryptographic keys.