Networking

Introduction

Networking is at a crossroads with customers increasingly looking for new ways to cope with pervasive datacenter virtualization and unprecedented demands for throughput and scale. Open Networking provides customers with an open, economical alternative to the traditional approach of heavy investment in expensive, complex, proprietary networking equipment.

» Watch The promise of Open Networking (Video - 11 min.)
High-level introduction to the benefits of Open Networking.

Project Crossbow is a major re-architecture of the OpenSolaris networking stack and delivers key technologies and functionality in OpenSolaris 2009.06 that make Open Networking possible. OpenSolaris 2009.06 also offers exceptional throughput and scaling.

» Read more about Project Crossbow.
» Read more about network performance enabled by Project Crossbow.

The Next Generation Networking Stack
OpenSolaris 2009.06 represents the most significant networking technology contribution from Sun in this decade. It provides advanced network resource management capabilities and enables OpenSolaris to take advantage of the latest multi-core, multi-CPU systems as well as next-generation network interface cards.

For Administrators
OpenSolaris includes a number of critical networking services, including a major update to IP Multipathing for High Availability network configurations. OpenSolaris also includes the IPFilter firewall and Quagga router services.

For Developers
Project Crossbow in OpenSolaris 2009.06 allows creating and simulating entire networks in a consolidated fashion. Together with its powerful network resource controls, this provides unprecedented flexibility for development and testing. OpenSolaris 2009.06 also has a re-architected sockets implementation and provides APIs to intercept IP traffic for custom packet filtering and inspection used, for example, to customize firewall behavior.. And OpenSolaris offers an enhanced user experience for networking, providing support for wireless laptop environments with automatic network configuration.

» More details on all the network components

Project Crossbow

Project Crossbow is to Open Networking what ZFS is to Open Storage. It extends a company's existing networking infrastructure and allows system adminstrators to leverage extensive virtualiation capabilities built directly into the platform.

» More details on Project Crossbow

What's New for Networking

Project Crossbow is the major networking innovation in OpenSolaris 2009.06, but there are other significant additions:

• • High availability networking through IP Multipathing has undergone a major update. Read more.


• • Improved performance for sockets and new facilities for pluggable sockets. Read more.


• • Enhancements for observing network traffic. Read more.

Major Networking Components

For a complete list of major networking enhancements in OpenSolaris 2009.06, see the Networking Projects Overview page.

Community

Read what others are doing to take advantage of the networking innovation in OpenSolaris.
If you have a use case you would like to highlight, want to interact with the engineers behind the projects or would like to make your own contributions, join the OpenSolaris networking community

.

Performance

See the network performance numbers for OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Links

» Get OpenSolaris 2009.06
» The Promise of Open Networking (Video - 11 min.)
» Networking Technologies within OpenSolaris 2009.06 (Video - 12 min.)
» OpenSolaris Networking for Developers (Video - 8 min.)
» For Project Crossbow specific links, see the Project Crossbow page