Anypoint: Extensible Transport Switching on the Edge

Anypoint is a new model for one-to-many communication with ensemble sites—aggregations of end nodes that appear to the external Internet as a unified site. Policies for routing Anypoint traffic are defined by application-layer plugins residing in extensible routers at the ensemble edge. Anypoint's switching functions operate at the transport layer at the granularity of transport frames. Communication over an Anypoint connection preserves end-to-end transport rate control, partial ordering, and reliable delivery. Experimental results from a host-based Anypoint prototype and an NFS storage router application show that Anypoint is a powerful technique for virtualizing and extending cluster services, and is amenable to implementation in high-speed switches. The Anypoint prototype improves storage router throughput by 29% relative to a TCP proxy.