Patent ID: 8255510

Claim:
A method comprising: providing a network operating system (NOS) on each processor element (PE) of a plurality of PEs of a switch in which software objects represent a basic unit of management, the NOS including an object manager (OM) responsible for managing global software object groups, managing software object configurations, managing local software objects and groups and routing control information between address spaces based on locations of software objects; establishing an object-to-object channel between a first software object and a second software object of the plurality of software objects by allocating within the first software object a first connection end point (CEP) associated with the object-to-object channel; allocating within the second software object a second CEP associated with the object-to-object channel; and forming a connection between the first CEP and the second CEP; performing, by the OM, management plane communications among a plurality of software objects by way of system calls; performing, by the OM, data plane communications among the plurality of software objects by way of object-to-object channels; and provisioning the switch with a network-based managed Internet Protocol (IP) service for a particular customer of a plurality of customers of a service provider by pushing the network-based managed IP service onto the object-to-object channel established between the first software object and the second software object.