Routing fish

The system has two 10GBe interfaces and four 1 GBe interfaces. The 10GBe interfaces are on die, directly coupled to the crossbar, so you have a low latency there. A nice configuration to start with. For more interfaces i would suggest the usage of a "router-on-a-stick" configuration: Activating VLAN-tagging on the 10GBe-Interfaces and use a normal switch as a fan-out unit.

So what can we do software-wise with the system: The standards ... obviously ... like routing or channel bundling. Furthermore: We have Crossbow with it´s virtual nics, it´s virtual switches and so on. We have Zones. So we could divide the router in seperate administrative domains. With Crossbow you can do traffic management as well and controlling bandwidth consumption.

There is Quagga as an open-source routing protocol suite available in standard Solaris: OSPFv2, OSPFv3, RIP v1 and v2, RIPng and BGP-4. There is a full-fledged IPsec suite in the OS and 8 crypto units in the CPU. It should be possible to build a decent highspeed SSL-Accelerator with kssl or apache2. There is a IPfilter firewall included in Solaris. The project to extend the networking subsystem with more dtrace probes is in it´s full run. And we have this excellent GUI with Fishworks. Instead of measuring disk latency you would measure link latency.

Combining all this stuff should result in an really interesting package. Sound like a decent idea .. i thini i will invest some further thoughts on it ...