Traffic (QoS) control built into your EON ZFS storage

Your EON ZFS storage provides access to a lot of services, such as HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, Firefly/daapd, AFP(AppleShare) and more. All of these services are available as a network resource. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to control or manage how different systems use these network resources, such as bandwidth?

Project Crossbow provides the controls to manage and virtual-ize network resources. The traffic controls (QoS) can be used to manage by transport (TCP, UDP, SCTP, iSCSI, etc), bandwidth limits, IP address and more.

For example, one could simply limit the amount of bandwidth the HTTP, HTTPS or SSH service can utilize. You could create virtual nics bound to your real interface and provide different levels of service and bandwith to these virtual or real nics. It allows for a very flexible storage setup where you can really manage the traffic and quality of service it delivers.

Let's do a simple 10Mbps bandwidth limit for HTTP via interface bge0 for a flow we will label httpflow. First, we create a flow that matches the HTTP service

flowadm add-flow -l bge0 -a transport=tcp,local_port=80 httpflow

Let's view it

flowadm show-flow

Finally, let's set bandwidth limits

flowadm set-flowprop -p maxbw=10m httpflow

To verify the properties

flowadm show-flowprop

To show traffic usage

flowadm show-usage

Accounting can also be setup to record the usage. Rather than rehash the numerous possibilities, here are 2 links that details this feature fairly well. The first is written by Ben Rockwood and the other can be found here. Traffic control ... out!