Patent ID: 8751603

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a processor; a computer readable storage medium coupled to the processor; a cluster specific interface device connected to a plurality of communication channels, each channel corresponding to an underlying hardware; a pseudo interface device without an underlying communication hardware coupled to the cluster specific interface device; and logic, stored on the computer readable medium and executed on the processor, for: configuring the pseudo interface device with an interact protocol (IP) address; generating a first communication link between an application and the pseudo interlace device, wherein the first communication link is bound to the IP address; receiving at the pseudo interface device an application packet from the application on the first communication link; generating a cluster interface packet by converting the application packet to a protocol corresponding to the cluster specific interface device; generating a hardware specific packet corresponding to a particular one of the underlying hardware based upon the cluster interface packet; and transmitting the cluster interface packet via the cluster interface device to the particular hardware via the corresponding communication channel.