The following sections are meant to provide information about some of the projects handled by Avnisoft. Since they are only a sampling of our project experience, please visit our contact page to inquire about specific skills or experience not covered here.

Design of the Switching Fabric for a Carrier-Class Router
Quality Assurance for SAN Products
Network Attached Storage (NAS) Development
Clustering Software Development
Network Processor Implementation for IP Switching Application
Migration of a Major RDBMS to a 64 Bit Platform
Design of a Bridging Stack for a LAN-based switch
Development of Networking Software for A Satellite Broadband Delivery System
Maintenance of L2 and L3 Enterprise LAN Switches
File System Mirroring Project
EMS for Managing SDH Network Elements

Design of the Switching Fabric for a Carrier-Class Router
Avnisoft was contracted by a well recognized networking equipment manufacturer to design the software elements of the switching fabric of a router target at the carrier market. As such, issues such at scalability, redundancy and security were key to our software architecture and design. Avnisoft designed and implemented the project. Commercial IP and routing stacks were ported onto VxWorks on a PowerPC platform, and an architecture was implemented to provide redundancy for the protocols and fabric. From a user interface perspective, our team also created the CLI related to this portion of the router.

Quality Assurance for SAN Products
Our staff has been hired to carry out a wide variety of QA projects for various vendors’ SAN products:

• Developed a System Test Plan for a RAID storage subsystem supporting RAID 1,3 and 5
• Validated a major storage vendor’s VM compatibility with HP’s LVM
• Tested Fibre Channel SAN device drivers under a wide variety topological conditions in a HP-UX environment

Network Attached Storage (NAS) Development
Developed device drivers and configuration utilities for NAS. Environment included VxWorks based IDE, Mylex DAC960SX external RAID controller and heterogeneous NFS v3 and SMB.

Clustering Software Development
Avnisoft developed the initial and second version of a major computer vendor’s clustering software. We dealt with a wide variety of issues including membership, locking and fail-over.

Network Processor Implementation for IP Switching Application
Avnisoft was responsible for various aspects of integrating our client’s selected network processor into an IP switching system. Well-written code designed to achieve wire speed operation was a key design goal. We developed microcode for IP forwarding based on RFC 1812, implemented CAM lookup and ACL tables updates, dealt with congestion control and priorities, and implemented host drivers and interfaces for the network processor and switching elements.

Migration of a Major RDBMS to a 64 Bit Platform
Avnisoft successfully migrated our client’s RDBMS from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform. This required enhancing the system to exploit larger memory, file size and shared memory segments, while maintaining 32-bit compatibility and performance.

Design of a Bridging Stack for a LAN-based switch
Our customer was in the process of building a LAN switch around the Galnet II architecture. We built the software architecture to exploit the selected hardware and implement appropriate partitioning. Specific functionality included IEEE 802.1q, 802.1d and STP.

Development of Networking Software for A Satellite Broadband Delivery System
Our customer was in the process of building a Satellite Broadband Delivery System. Avnisoft undertook development of the networking interface. We created device drivers for the Digital Broadcast Network Satellite receiver and demux systems, as well as an enhanced Ethernet device driver. Work on the IIC interface, DMA controller, DeMux subsytem and IP stack integration were also involved. The target platform was a PPC 405GP running a Linux kernal.

Maintenance of L2 and L3 Enterprise LAN Switches
Avnisoft has experience maintaining existing products for clients. We have maintained Layer 2 and 3 switches, including the following technologies:

• Bridging, STP, VLAN mSTG, L2 trunking, PPP over SONET
• TCP/IP, RIP, OSPF
• ATM Signalling, IPOA, ILMI, AAL5

The platform for these projects was PowerPC running VxWorks. Our team dealt with issues relations to VLAN membership, non-standard BPDU’s, ST loops, and a variety of error conditions.

File System Mirroring Project
Avnisoft engineers successfully designed, implemented and tested a mirroring system implemented at the file and directory level. The system was implemented in VFS as a kernel module and supports heterogeneous file types.

EMS for Managing SDH Network Elements
Our team implemented a complete OO design for a EMS, utilizing OOAD, C++ and CORBA. A wide range of design issues were dealt with including NE configuration discovery, auto detection of new cards, dealing with distributed transactions, multi-threading and concurrency.