BiviOS™ Software
At the foundation of Bivio platforms is a standard Linux execution environment that allows any Linux-based networking application to run on the appliance with little porting effort. The Bivio software environment is called BiviOS™ and includes a comprehensive set of networking and management features in addition to the Linux kernel and common APIs.
By basing the Bivio 2000 and Bivio 7000 Series network appliances on a standard, pre-ported Linux distribution with full API compatibility, software developers can quickly and easily run applications within hours of unpacking the platform. BiviOS™ is transparent to the programmer but immediately allows applications to take full advantage of the performance, flexibility, and scalability inherent in the family of Bivio network appliance platforms.
BiviOS™ also supports a rich set of software infrastructure components that allow developers to quickly realize advanced capabilities of Bivio network appliances. These components provide a variety of critical services including robust traffic management, load distribution across the multiple Application Processor CPUs, and wire-speed Quality of Service (QoS) functionality. Bivio Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable further customization and optimization of the Bivio architecture to the specific application requirements.
Benefits
Standard Linux Environment: The Bivio 2000 and Bivio 7000 Series network appliances are shipped with a pre-ported, standard Linux distribution and maintains full Linux API compatibility so that existing applications can be quickly loaded, compiled and executed on the platform without modification.
Rapid Development: In addition to the standard Linux kernel and APIs, BiviOS™ includes advanced configuration features to enable developers to integrate “off-the-shelf” or custom deep packet inspection and processing applications that fully exploit the capabilities of the Bivio appliance in as little as a few days. Bivio APIs provide additional extensions to allow applications to further manipulate and control the application-hardware interactions, further optimizing the performance of the system.
Efficient: System resources are allocated based on actual application demand and packets are processed with the lowest latency possible.
Unique: BiviOS™ and enhanced APIs can map traffic to specific applications, tap inline traffic, copy traffic to parallel applications, and accelerate traffic on an inline path - all controlled by the application through APIs.
Easy to use: Application developers can extend from their existing code base and build incrementally more value into the product.
Fault tolerant: BiviOS™ monitors the health of the Application Processor CPUs in the Bivio appliance and provides fully redundant management for each subsystem, meaning that in the case of some type of failure on one of the application processors, the network processor seamlessly redistributes traffic to the application processors that remain active in the Bivio platform.
Traffic Modes
All Bivio 2000 and Bivio 7000 Series platforms can be configured to support either of two traffic modes: transparent mode or mixed mode. Transparent mode supports traditional inline or “sniff” behavior, as all network interfaces are configured with no IP address and the platform appears invisible, or like a wire, to the network devices on either side. Mixed mode allows configu¬rations to be used where some interfaces are in transparent mode, and some (or even all) interfaces are in gateway or “routed” mode. In gateway mode packets must be routed through the platform as if it was a router, and each interface is on a different subnet, has a unique IP address, and is independently addressable from outside the appliance.
Configurable Inspection Groups
Configurable Inspection Groups (CIG) are the foundation for expanding the Bivio network appliance into multiple virtual systems and consolidating complimentary applications on a single platform. The basic function of CIG is to bind specific interfaces to classification policies and distribute incoming traffic to the assigned computational resources according to the classification. In the example below, IP traffic is classified into two groups which are then load balanced among a dedicated Inspection Group, or group of CPUs. Different applications or configurations can be run on different Inspection Groups, allowing complete flexibility in applying the platform's resources to different tasks.
Bivio APIs and Advanced Modes
Bivio APIs enable system developers to utilize several advanced capabilities of the Bivio architecture as well as offer unique value-added capabilities for custom product differentiation. Bivio APIs include advanced capabilities for traffic modes, system scaling, management and high availability functions on the Bivio network appliance.
Traffic Modes
The default operation of the Bivio network appliance is to load balance all traffic from the network interfaces across all Application Processors. Although this configuration is sufficient for many inline and transparent network applications, the Bivio platform can be easily configured to sup¬port advanced network operations in multiple traffic modes.
- Inline Tap Mode: In this mode, the platform operates as a transparent inline device while packets are being copied from the "wire" to the application. Therefore, packets can be sniffed at wire speed and without the need for mirror-ports on a switch.
- Parallel-Processing with Packet Copy: Sometimes, different applications need to inspect the same packet, but would normally experience resource contention when running on the same processor or shared memory. The Bivio platform avoids these resource contentions by copying packets in hardware to parallel applications without sacrificing throughput or latency. The scalable processing architecture ensures sufficient resources for each application even at full line rate processing.
- Network-Layer CPU-Offload: In this mode the Application decides which flows to process at the Application Layer and which ones to offload to the programmable Network Layer. This functionality significantly increases the effective capacity of the device. For latency sensitive traffic like VoIP and multimedia, applications can tap into control flows while data flows get forwarded on an accelerated inline path through the network layer, thereby keeping data path latencies at an absolute minimum.
Zero-Copy User Space Access
A common technique for accelerating computing systems is to provide direct I/O access to the application user space. These zero-copy drivers are often customizable to the specific application and the Bivio implementation supports the Linux “IPTables” packet filter.
Management
The Bivio 2000 and Bivio 7000 Series network appliance platforms support a command line interface (CLI) as well as a web-based graphical user interface (GUI). The Bivio CLI provides auto-completion, tab completion and context-sensitive help. The Bivio GUI is an easy-to-navigate web-based interface that includes various system monitor and inventory monitor views.
High Availability
Besides standard hardware-based HA features such as dual hard drives and power supplies, the Bivio system offers additional HA functionality such as internal redundancy of Application Processors with failure-adaptive load balancing, external system redundancy configuration, software- and hardware based failopen (bypass), DoS-attack protection, and the independent control processor with management ports. The Bivio architecture ensures sufficient resources for each application even at full line rate processing.
