Described herein are systems and methods of coupling network infrastructure devices through a shared memory facility, rather than through conventional network I/O (input/output) adapters. All communications through the resulting network infrastructure service system are conducted using shared memory as the physical transport medium. In this way, the congestion and processing overhead caused by the duplication and storage of multiple copies of data packets to be transferred between network infrastructure devices may be avoided. This feature of the invention significantly increases the speed at which packets may be transmitted between network infrastructure devices.