Manish Vaidya of NextHop Technologies is going to tell us about
routing using more general purpose computing devices than
routers, and how that can help network security.
We start with very basic facts. For example, network security failures
are bad for business. And it’s bad for your network to go down.
“Aligning routing and security policies gives network administrators
complete control over network performance, stability, and
reliability.”
The talk draws a sharp line between “hardware”, which include routers
and security devices, and “software”, which run on general purpose
computers. But these “hardware” devices are usually full
computers with specialized software, and that software can usually
do the kinds of things he’s showing running on general purpose
PCs. However, he says that firewall appliances are usually less
flexible about routing protocols than general computers can be.
And, 20 minutes into a 45 minute talk, he seems to have run out of
material. Basically, if you put their software on your application
servers, you can have greater reliability because the servers can
use routing protocols to send traffic to the servers that are up.
It does seem useful for a lot of applications.
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