Project NEon

Project NEon - The Road from Appliances to Network Elements

By early 2004, appliances that combine a small set of related services as an integrated solution were beginning to be offered in the marketplace. Project NEon is the first proponent of driving this approach to its logical extreme. Project NEon investigates a paradigm shift away from special purpose network appliances to an integrated way to architect, operate, and manage data plane network services. We were interested in evaluating the benefits of data flow management and enforcement inside the data center edge. We therefore investigated ways to architect data flow management over high bandwidth network connections feeding data centers, and focused our attention on handling data flows vs. individual packets.

Integrated Network Service Processing Using Programmable Network Devices (Technical Report)