PARIS, France, October 23, 2012 — 6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced the availability of support within the 6WINDGate™ software solution for the Intel platform for communications infrastructure, formerly codenamed “Crystal Forest.” 6WIND will showcase this support at the 4G World conference in Chicago from October 29th through November 1st (booth 638).
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, which solves critical performance challenges for Software Defined Networking in both mobile and cloud infrastructure applications,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “6WINDGate is already deployed in tens of commercial LTE networks throughout in Asia, Europe and North America, while also being used by multiple tier-1 suppliers of cloud infrastructure 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 communications platform, formerly codenamed ‘Crystal Forest’.”
“Commercial software availability and support for the Intel platform for communications infrastructure enables customers to quickly implement industry-leading solutions for mobile and cloud networking equipment,” says Steve Price, general manager, Intel Communications Infrastructure Division. “Solutions such as 6WINDGate that support a virtualized communications infrastructure environment are needed to support the increasing traffic volumes and intelligent processing that is occurring at the network edge.”
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.
For data center operators, rapid increases in the number of Virtual Machines (VMs) per server blade drive a need for the data center network to expand beyond its current limit at the Top-of-Rack, to a model where a virtual switch on each server blade is used to distribute the increasing volume of network traffic to virtualized applications, while multi-tenant architectures require traffic engineering to be performed at the server edge. At the same time, data center network appliances are migrating from physical implementations to virtualized architectures running on general-purpose processor platforms similar to the application servers, in order to achieve minimum cost and maximum flexibility.
The 6WINDGate software provides a proven solution to these challenges, delivering a comprehensive, portable suite of networking protocols, with full support for virtualized environments. These include a full set of control plane modules and a wide range of fast path protocols optimized for platforms 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 Intel platform for communications infrastructure, 6WINDGate delivers over 15 million packets per second, per core of IP forwarding performance, thereby forwarding 10Gbps of network traffic in each core (64-byte packets). 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.
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 Intel platform for communications infrastructure 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 and cloud infrastructure equipment. 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.
