Intelligent failover in a load-balanced networking environment

Abstract

A hash table in the network device driver maintains data on the traffic characteristics for each network interface ('NIC') within a computing device. If one of the NICs in the computing device becomes unreliable, the cost function in the hash engine allows the software driver to initiate network traffic redistribution among the remaining reliable NICs in the computing device. Using this hash engine, the software driver is able to intelligently redirect each of the network connections on an unreliable NIC to a reliable NIC within the computing device, in a way that optimizes the distribution of network traffic across the remaining reliable NICs. Alternatively, if a connection is moved from an old NIC to a new NIC, the software driver can detect the moved connection and offload the moved connection to a hardware offload engine on the new NIC. With this approach, issues such as network interface overloading and computing device performance degradation may be more easily avoided when failing over network connections, thereby improving overall system performance relative to prior art techniques.