6WIND Announces Availability of Support for Intel® Xeon® Processor Platform for Large-Scale Communications Infrastructure Systems, formerly called “Highland Forest”

PARIS, December 4, 2013 — 6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced the availability of support within the 6WINDGate™ software for the Intel® Xeon® Processor Platform for Large-Scale Communications Infrastructure Systems, formerly called “Highland Forest.” Thanks to its optimized support for the Intel® QuickAssist Technology that provides hardware acceleration for encryption and compression, 6WINDGate delivers best-in-class performance for networking applications such as WAN optimization, VPN appliances, firewalls and Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems.

In telecom, enterprise and cloud infrastructure, network traffic continues to grow exponentially, driven by the demands of mobile video and cloud-based services. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of threats that target both consumer and enterprise subscribers drives a need for increased performance and more advanced features in network security appliances. This support must be provided both for traditional physical appliances and for virtual appliances that are increasingly deployed as part of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) architectures.

The 6WINDGate software leverages the on-chip security features of the Intel® Communications Chipset 8925, 8950, and 8955 (formerly called “Coleto Creek”) to maximize the performance of networking security applications running on the Intel® Xeon E5-2400 v2 and E5-2600 v2 processors (formerly called “Ivy Bridge”). Within 6WINDGate, optimized protocols such as IPsec and firewall use the Intel® QuickAssist Technology software to efficiently offload advanced security functions to the Chipset, maximizing overall system-level performance.

“Network security OEMs have achieved significant cost-performance improvements through the adoption of 6WINDGate, which solves critical performance challenges for both physical and virtual appliances,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “6WINDGate is already deployed in tens of commercial LTE networks throughout Asia, Europe and North America, while also being used by multiple tier-1 suppliers of enterprise and cloud networking equipment. Our engineers have worked closely with Intel to ensure that 6WINDGate is optimized to deliver best-in-class packet processing performance on the Intel® Xeon® Processor Platform for Large-Scale Communications Infrastructure Systems, for both physical and virtual implementations.”

“Commercial software availability and support for the Intel® Xeon® Processor Platform for Large-Scale Communications Infrastructure Systems enables customers to quickly implement industry-leading solutions for telecom, enterprise and cloud infrastructure,” said Frank Schapfel, Product Line Manager at Intel. “Solutions such as 6WINDGate that support both physical and virtual infrastructure are needed to support the increase in traffic volume and security threats.”

6WINDGate support for the Intel® Xeon® Processor Platform for Large-Scale Communications Infrastructure Systems will be available in Q1 2014. For more information please visit http://www.6wind.com.