Announcing going live of Project Virtual Network Machines (VNM) ===============================================================
Virtual Network Machines is an OpenSolaris project to exploit the networking technology in OpenSolaris in non-traditional ways. The project is being motivated by several industry trends: 1) Exploiting the advantages of open source for network devices like routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. With technologies like Crossbow and Zones and integration of Quagga Routing protocol suite, Solaris is well postioned to be the platform of choice in this area. 2) With Sun leading the field in CMT and NIC sitting very close to the processors, Niagara2 and Neptune NIC provide the necessary performance on the general purpose hardware. 3) Network Virtualization can drive the consolidation of networking devices in very exciting new ways. Not only can multiple different network devices can be combined using Virtual Network Machines but interesting combinations can be created where a traditional application on a server can be made to run close to its network function. The project has just started and you are invited to join a lively discussion and possibilities at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/vnm/ The webpage is still not showing the discussion link but you can subscribe to the discussion forum by sending mail to vnm-discuss-subscribe at opensolaris.org. -- Sunay Tripathi Distinguished Engineer Solaris Core Operating System Sun MicroSystems Inc. Solaris Networking: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/networking Project Crossbow: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow
