Wire-speed total order

Many distributed systems may be limited in their performance by the number of transactions they are able to support per unit of time. In order to achieve fault tolerance and to boost a system´s performance, active state machine replication is frequently used. It employs total ordering service to keep the state of replicas synchronized. In this paper, we present an architecture that enables a drastic increase in the number of ordered transactions in a cluster, using off-the-shelf network equipment. Performance supporting nearly one million ordered transactions per second has been achieved, which substantiates our claim