Networking Practice
The networking practice builds software for networked appliances. The work in this practice spans the complete software stack from kernel development services to libraries to applications. The broad classification of what the practice does is as below:
Differentiation
It is evident that networking technology is becoming more and more application aware in order to provide the best possible user experience. A direct consequence of this is the fact that decisions deep down in the stack are affected by the understanding of application and user behavior. GS Lab’s networking practice is differentiated by its insight of issues in all layers of the software stack.
Some of the current work in progress
Layer 7 application firewall appliance for the data center market
Boot services for a high speed interconnect switch fabric
Gigabit data recorder
NIC level throughput enhancement for cloud computing applications
Mobile IP v6 and network mobility
Payload capture, inspection, and reporting
Delivery capabilities
The networking practice has delivered a number of complete products and/or features ground up. Here’s a sampling that gives an idea of the type of work delivered.
Peer-to-peer Internet service built on MIPv6 standards to create secure, simple, persistent connection between mobile, fixed computers and other network devices
Communication using secure IPSec tunnel between devices within a VPN group that works over Firewalls and NATs
Packet inspections, processing, encapsulation, and policy enforcement
Support for mobile routers by implementing NEMO (Network Mobility) specifications. Provide accessibility to nodes behind mobile routers
Support secure communication through mobile router to mobile nodes guaranteed using SEND (Secure Neighbor Discovery) implantation
Directory virtualization for LDAP (Lightweight directory protocol) and AD
(Active Directory)
SASL, Kerberos, NTLM based authentications
The networking practice has accumulated specific expertise on booting services for diskless blade servers and also on specific protocols for high performance networks such as Infiniband.
Developing kernel drivers (RHEL, SuSE), low-level firmware solutions and testing enterprise grade Infiniband switches, Ethernet and Fibre channel gateways
Various upper layer protocols of the Infiniband software stack like IPoIB (IP over Infiniband), SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol), SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol), MPI (Message Passing Interface), etc.
Infiniband open source communities and interoperability working groups
Boot firmware solutions for the Infiniband Host Channel Adapter (HCA)
Interfacing with device firmware and BIOS level interactions to provide the OS boot loader transparent access to remote disks
The networking practice of GS Lab also engages with the customers for the design, development and testing of the network management system. The technologies used are:
J2EE/Web based NMS UI,
Swing/AWT/C++ based standalone NMS application, and
SNMP/HTTP based element management system for embedded devices.