6WIND Announces OpenFlow Compatibility within Open vSwitch Acceleration Solution
PARIS, May 6, 2013 — 6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced full OpenFlow protocol compatibility within its 6WINDGate™ networking software. Targeted for use in cloud and telecom data centers, the Open vSwitch acceleration solution based on 6WINDGate delivers a 10x performance improvement for virtual switches, addressing critical scalability challenges faced by service providers. At the recent Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, CA, conference attendees viewed a demonstration of the 6WINDGate virtual switch acceleration in 6WIND’s booth.
The OpenFlow protocol is gaining traction in Software Defined Networking (SDN) architectures as well as the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiatives. Through SDN and NFV, both data center operators and telecom carriers benefit from reduced CAPEX, lower OPEX and the ability to accelerate the introduction of new, value-added services. OpenFlow contributes to those benefits by providing a standardized protocol for the centralized control and management of distributed network elements.
“Full compatibility with standard OpenFlow controllers will accelerate adoption of the 6WINDGate software in enterprise, cloud and telecom applications,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “Besides supporting the OpenFlow protocol, 6WINDGate also accelerates the performance of the standard Open vSwitch (OVS) by 10x, with no changes required to the OVS code itself. At the same time, it delivers high performance for secure tunneling protocols which are required for multi-tenant data centers, such as IPsec, GRE, NVGRE, VLAN and VxLAN. These benefits result in significant improvements in virtual machine (VM) density, or the number of VMs per blade, enabling significant reductions in service providers’ CAPEX and OPEX.”
“We were excited to see 6WIND using the Floodlight OpenFlow controller to showcase their OpenFlow compatibility. 6WINDGate has some exciting performance characteristics that are applicable to a number of SDN use cases,” said Mike Cohen, Director of Strategic Alliances at Big Switch Networks.
6WINDGate supports all versions of OpenFlow that are supported by the standard OVS solution and this compatibility will continue as future versions of OpenFlow are released. The OVS acceleration is transparent to the applications running on the platform, which do not need to be recompiled or re-verified in order to work with this high-performance solution. The 6WINDGate solution for OVS acceleration is available now. For more information please visit http://www.6wind.com.
About 6WIND
6WIND provides the only commercial software solution that solves network performance challenges for OEMs delivering advanced networking functions in mobile infrastructure equipment, networking appliances and data center networking. The company’s 6WINDGate™ networking software is optimized for cost-effective hardware based on industry-standard multicore processors, enabling rich Software Defined Networking (SDN) services and Network-as-a-Service capabilities that monetize services such as bandwidth, QoS and security. 6WIND delivers sustainable competitive advantages to both service providers and network equipment manufacturers. A privately owned company, 6WIND is based near Paris, France with regional offices in China, Japan, South Korea and the United States. For more information, visit http://www.6wind.com.