Patent ID: 7457861

Claim:
A data management component for tracking a plurality of Network Interface Card (NIC) connections resident on a computing system, wherein said computing system employs Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) for data communications from a VIA enabled software application on said computing system with data destinations other than said VIA enabled software application wherein a path for said data communications is through at least one Network Interface Card (NIC) with at least one port connection per each NIC, said data management component comprising: a Physical NIC data structure for keeping data needed and used to manage each instance of a NIC, a Logical NIC data area useable by a Kernel Agent on said computer system to manage a plurality of logical NIC objects made visible to the Virtual Interface Provider Library and to the Application program, including a link to all Physical NICs for devices within said Logical NIC, said Logical NIC having a Master Completion Queue through which all completions for all Physical NICS associated with said Logical NIC, a protection tag table data structure for storing locally unique protection tag for each application, providing that each protection tag is a unique value within a NIC so that only one application's privileges are related to any one of said protection tags.