HP-UX networking can gracefully scale up from 1 processor to 256 processors, from gigabytes to tens of gigabytes of memory, from 10 Base T to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, from the classic IPv4 to the next generation IPv6. It gracefully adapts to different networking needs in an enterprise, from noisy, low bandwidth, wireless environments to high bandwidth, high throughput, data centre environments.
Wireless networks pose unique challenges to networking professionals. To address these challenges, the HP-UX 11i networking team has been working very closely with our customers on the development and deployment of Wireless TCP technology. Wireless TCP on the HP-UX 11i networking stack is being used extensively, including a customer with over 40 million mobile subscribers accessing the Internet using cell phones. HP-UX 11i has optimised their TCP layer to maximise wireless traffic throughput.
Enterprises continue to consolidate their IT infrastructure around data centres to improve operational efficiency. HP-UX 11i provides a comprehensive suite of products to meet the mission-critical networking needs. This includes directory and security, distributed file systems, internet and transport services.
In the area of transport, data centre networks present specific challenges in dealing with heterogeneous operating systems and providing quality of service guarantee to lines of businesses in a consolidated environment.
- Windows inter-operability: Through the premier partnership with Microsoft, HP-UX continues to lead in inter-operability with Windows systems. Early and extensive testing of networking inter-operability between Windows and HP-UX enables any potential issues to be identified and corrected before reaching our customers.
- Linux inter-operability: The classic TCP protocol adopts a sender centric congestion control where the sender determines the network bandwidth availability and throttles the traffic accordingly. In some Linux systems, however, the burden of congestion control is placed on the receiver. HP-UX gracefully adapts to work effectively with these systems through a number of mechanisms including a Large Initial Slow Start threshold.
- Traffic Segregation: The ability to segregate the network traffic in a consolidated environment is important in meeting the service level agreements of different lines of business. HP-UX 11i networking fully supports Virtual LAN (VLAN) technology, a particularly useful tool for this purpose. It has the added benefit of providing a degree of security isolation between the businesses.
Fibre Channel is the predominant interconnect technology deployed in storage area networks today. It is highly reliable and offers great performance. However, in situations where the cost, flexibility and ease of deployment are more important, there are other promising technologies available. Currently, the main contenders are iSCSI and Infiniband, both of which are supported by HP-UX networking.
- iSCSI: iSCSI has come of age and is beginning to make a significant impact on the storage market particularly in situations where flexibility and cost are more important than absolute performance. The standard compliant HP-UX 11i iSCSI implementation supports also Service Location Protocol (SLP) and Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) with no special iSCSI configuration needed on network interface cards.
- IP over Infiniband: As Infiniband gains in popularity in storage area networks (SAN), so does the need to provide an IP based interface on these entities to ensure broad connectivity. HP-UX 11i networking supports IP over Infiniband-this allows IP applications to operate seamlessly over an InfiniBand network.
For improved performance and disaster tolerance, enterprises employ geographically dispersed data centres. However, bursty traffic across these data centres, if inappropriately managed, could lead to network congestion. HP-UX incorporates new capability to dynamically determine the bandwidth availability across geographically dispersed data centres to ensure congestion-free traffic.
