6WIND Announces Support for Software-Defined Networking
PARIS, France, February 15, 2012 — 6WIND, the gold standard for software-defined networks, today announced support within the 6WINDGate™ software solution for the next-generation communications platform from Intel, code name “Crystal Forest.” 6WIND will showcase this support at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 27th through March 1st (booth 2B122) and at RSA Conference in San Francisco from February 27th through March 2nd (booth 242).
Already used by OEMs in products based on earlier Intel® architecture platforms, 6WINDGate includes optimized support for the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel® DPDK), enabling the development of best-in-class networking equipment for mobile and cloud infrastructure.
“OEMs have achieved significant OPEX and CAPEX improvements through adopting 6WINDGate for both mobile and cloud infrastructure applications,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “6WINDGate is already deployed in tens of LTE networks worldwide, while also being used by multiple tier-1 suppliers of cloud infrastructure equipment. Our customers are reaping the rewards of being early to market with cost-optimized products that offer compelling performance. Our engineers have worked closely with Intel to ensure that 6WINDGate is optimized to deliver excellent packet processing performance on their future platform.”
For mobile service providers, the explosion in mobile Internet traffic presents challenges that are far more complex than simply adding subscriber capacity. The exponential growth in mobile video traffic, for example, requires software-defined networks running on standard hardware platforms. Since it’s impossible to predict the next “killer app”, networks must be designed for high scalability, rather than for the needs of specific, well-known applications.
Cloud infrastructure also requires high-performance, flexible networks to provide on-demand services. Delivering value-added network services via “virtual appliances”, such as WAN optimization, security and load balancing, running on standard hardware platforms significantly reduces network CAPEX and OPEX in data centers.
While addressing these issues of performance, virtualization and scalability, engineering teams face constant pressure to minimize their time-to-market by maximizing the reuse of proprietary, legacy software, typically developed over multiple product generations and proven through extensive field experience.
The 6WINDGate software provides a proven solution to these challenges, delivering a comprehensive, portable suite of networking protocols optimized for mobile infrastructure and virtual appliances. These include a full set of control plane modules, a high-performance networking stack and a wide range of fast path protocols optimized for processors such as the Intel® Xeon® processor family. 6WINDGate is fully scalable across processors, across boards and across subsystems, allowing applications to be deployed in line with dynamically-changing network traffic patterns with no impact to per-core performance. This scalability facilitates the consolidation of packet processing, application and control processing workloads on a single platform.
On the next-generation communications platform from Intel, 6WINDGate will deliver over 14 million packets per second, per core of IP forwarding performance, thereby forwarding 10Gbps of network traffic in each core (64-byte packets, “Crystal Forest” evaluation platform). This performance scales linearly with the number of cores configured to run 6WINDGate until the maximum bandwidth of the hardware platform is reached. Processor cores not used to run 6WINDGate are available to run value-added application software or Virtual Machines (VMs), resulting in a highly efficient and flexible system for advanced networking equipment.
“We have seen great support from our software ecosystem for our next-generation communications platform,” said Steve Price, Marketing Director, Communications Infrastructure Division, Intel. “Commercial solutions such as 6WINDGate will enable customers to quickly implement workload consolidation on “Crystal Forest”, enabling not only high performance packet processing but also control plane and application workloads.”
In order to further accelerate their clients’ development process and minimize schedule risk, 6WIND provides the 6WINDGate software pre-integrated with the Intel® DPDK along with full technical support for the combined solution. This integrated package avoids the need for clients to perform the integration themselves and ensures seamless synchronization between revisions of 6WINDGate and the Intel® DPDK.
6WINDGate support for the next-generation communications platform from Intel is available now to Intel’s early evaluation customers for the product. For more information please visit http://www.6wind.com.
About 6WIND
6WIND, the gold standard for software-defined networks, transforms mobile and cloud infrastructure by providing scalable, high-performance, low-latency networking software optimized for cost-effective hardware based on multicore processors, while enabling Network-as-a-Service capabilities that monetize network services such as bandwidth, QoS and security. The company’s 6WINDGate™ software delivers sustainable competitive advantages to network operators, service providers, system integrators and network equipment providers. 6WIND is a privately owned company based near Paris, France with offices in Mountain View, California, Seoul, South Korea and Beijing, China. For more information, visit http://www.6wind.com.