Regional firewall clustering in a networked computing environment

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9106610-B2
Application number	US-201313913022-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 7, 2013
Priority date	Jun 7, 2013
Publication date	Aug 11, 2015
Grant date	Aug 11, 2015

Abstract

An approach for regional firewall clustering for optimal state-sharing of different sites in a virtualized/networked (e.g., cloud) computing environment is provided. In a typical embodiment, each firewall in a given region is informed of its peer firewalls via a registration process with a centralized server. Each firewall opens up an Internet protocol (IP)-based communication channel to each of its peers in the region to share state table information. This allows for asymmetrical firewall flows through the network and allows routing protocols to ascertain the best path to a given destination without having to take firewall placement into consideration.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A method for managing a firewall cluster in a networked computing environment, comprising the computer-implemented steps of:
opening a communication channel between each firewall pair in the firewall cluster;
determining a round-trip time (RTT) value between each firewall pair in the firewall cluster using the respective communication channel;
defining a cluster delay time interval based on the highest round-trip time (RTT) value;
receiving a packet at…

Assignees

• IBM

Inventors

• Floyd Iii Robert K
• Mandalia Baiju D
• Monaco Robert P
• Viswanathan Mahesh

Classifications

• H04L63/02

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L63/0218 Primary

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L67/5681

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L63/20

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L67/10

  Electricity · mapped topic