Networking

Perspectives

In testament to both the stability of development builds of early versions of OpenSolaris as well as the deployment economics of Project Crossbow paired with Solaris Containers, Reliant Security began an implementation in 2006 of an offering to help retail businesses meet the demands from the credit card companies for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. A Forrester report highlights this effort.

Reliant Security felt they could dramatically change the economics of providing a PCI solution through the use of open source software running on industry standard hardware. A conventional solution would have been based on a high power PC to run the many virtual machines that provide the required services isolation plus a rack of special purpose networking equipment to provide VPN, routing and firewalls. Instead Reliant Security settled on a modest single 1GHz CPU, 1GB memory, 4 network port PC running an early development release of OpenSolaris with Project Crossbow. That modest system provided an impressive set of services- VPN, Routing, Firewalls, Log Aggregation & Storage, File Integrity Monitoring, Vulnerability Scanning, Wireless Access Point Detection, and Intrusion Detection all in a highly secure environment.

Today Reliant Security has deployed over 1100 retail solutions to their growing customer base.

Videos

Leveraging OpenSolaris Virtualization and Crossbow for Enhanced Security
Reliant Security's Richard Newman discusses their motivations for early adoption of Project Crossbow in their retail product.

Networking in the Cloud - Crossbow's Revolutionary Impact in a Virtualized World
Joyent's Ben Rockwood discusses motivations for early adoption what he likes about Crossbow and what he would like to see in future releases.

External Blogs

A number of observers have blogged about Crossbow since the inclusion of the latest updates into pre-OpenSolaris 2009.06 development releases. Here are some of the highlights.

Ben Rockwood on Crossbow for Christmas and Crossbow Experiments and Elation

c0t0d0s0.org review

Paul Murphy's ZDnet blog