Pegasos 8641D (CANCELED) Project
ObjectWall appliance (8641D performance testing/tuning)in category Applications & Software
proposed by kcg on 4th November 2006
Project Proposal
What is ObjectWall?ObjectWall is ObjectSecurity\'s IIOP protocol application level firewall. IIOP protocol is used in EJB/CORBA-based distributed systems and generally speaking if you are connecting such systems together over the hostile network (Internet) you will need something like IIOP firewall. You can also think about ObjectWall as a two black-box sitting in front of and protecting your business sensitive systems from the internet attacks on both sides. For nice example of ObjectWall usage I can recommend reading something about SimulateWorld 4D simulation system.
ObjectWall appliance
In fact ObjectSecurity also provides very similar black-box service in their ObjectWall appliance product. The only issue is that it\'s just x86 1U server and that some very mission critical applications require something different (PowerPC usually in VME/AdvancedTCA/other form). Here 8641D board comes to use since it provides ideal testing and tunning platform based on 8641D CPU which seems to be really network centric and so hopefully expected to be deployed in the places where ObjectWall will be also run.
What is needed to be done?
The only work needed to be done during the project is to port and test whole OW stack on this particular platform/cpu. After the porting work, the performance of the platform will be evaluated to get the clear picture about the exact performance of OW on this platform. The testing will be done using whole ObjectWall\'s testsuite to ensure that it is running correctly and that we cover whole application complexity range (i.e. simple CORBA app versus complex CORBA component or EJB app) during our performance testing.
Why 8641D?
It seems 8641D is really nice powerful and low-power consumption CPU for network centric applications. It\'s dual-core capability and 4 NICs are well suited for ObjectWall, since OW is fully multi-threaded and in addition it can use all 4 NICs: 2 for input/output, 1 for administration and 1 for fail-over state synchronization. i.e. fail-over means that if one OW firewall fails for whatever reason (usually hardware/network failure), the second one replaces it quickly and nearly transparently to the applications running on both sides.
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