What is WSD? Winsock Direct (WSD) is Microsoft's proprietary protocol that predates SDP for accelerating TCP/IP applications by using RDMA hardware. WSD is made up of two parts, the winsock direct switch and the winsock direct provider. The WSD switch is in the winsock DLL that ships in all editions of Windows Server series, and is responsible for routing socket traffic over either the regular TCP/IP stack, or offload it to a WSD provider. The WSD provider is a hardware specific DLL that implements connection management and data transfers over particular RDMA hardware.
