Anypoint is the first architecture to enable switching at the granularity of transport frames in extensible routers at the edge of the network. This approach allows service-specific application plugins (ALRMs), residing in the router, to coordinate request/response flows to and from the multiple nodes in an ensemble. These plugins may support dynamic request redirection, response merging from multiple servers, and other extensions for network services based on a partially ordered, framed IP transport.
Anypoint provides transport-layer guarantees including partial ordering, rate control, and reliable at-most-once delivery without the overhead to terminate the transport protocol in the switch. Experimental results with a host-based Anypoint prototype show that Anypoint is a powerful mechanism for traffic management and virtualization in server clusters. We present results from an Anypoint switch under various network conditions, showing that buffering overheads in the Anypoint intermediary are significantly lower than an application-level proxy. Results from an Anypoint-based NFS storage router show that Anypoint supports scalable services transparently to clients.