How cool would it be to be able to divide your physical network interface card (NIC) into several virtual interface cards and have the ability to prioritize networking traffic as well as having full resource control? Well, it could be a reality as Sun researchers and project "Crossbow" attempt to solve networking problems by making sure each application gets a set amount of bandwidth.

The project is described in the following way:

Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by virtualizing the stack and NIC around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol or Virtual machine.

Each virtual stack can be assigned its own priority and bandwidth on a shared NIC without causing any performance degradation. The architecture dynamically manages priority and bandwidth resources, and can provide better defense against denial-of-service attacks directed at a particular service or virtual machine by isolating the impact just to that entity. The virtual stacks are separated by means of H/W classification engine such that traffic for one stack does not impact other virtual stacks.

Project Crossbow is next step in the evolution of Solaris networking stack and brings bandwidth resource control and virtualization as part of the architecture itself instead of the usual add-on layers which have heavy overheads and complexity.

Project Crossbow is an OpenSolaris Project. More information about the project can be found on their official Web site, here.

Posted by David Marshall on June 11, 2006 07:03 AM