ENGINEERING

New software targeted at Cloud and Telecom Data Centers will be demonstrated at Open Networking Summit in Partnership with Big Switch Networks and Ixia

6WIND has announced extensions to its 6WINDGate networking software that delivers a 10x performance improvement for virtual switches. Targeted for use in cloud and telecom data centers, these new capabilities address critical scalability challenges faced by service providers. 6WIND will demonstrate this solution, in partnership with Big Switch Networks and Ixia, at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, CA from April 15^th through 17^th.

High-performance virtual switches are critical to supporting the increasing number of virtual machines used in multi-tenant data centers. The virtual switch performance improvement provided by 6WINDGate translates into increased virtual machine density per server and a corresponding decrease in service provider CAPEX and OPEX.

6WINDGate delivers similar benefits for telecom operators adopting Network Function Virtualization (NFV) within their networks. With NFV, networking functions that were traditionally implemented in dedicated, physical equipment are now delivered as pure software solutions, running as virtualized applications on standard blades in data center-type environments.

“The 6WINDGate networking software solves critical performance and scalability challenges for virtual switches,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “While retaining full compatibility with standard virtual switch software such as Open vSwitch, 6WINDGate provides an optimized data plane solution that delivers more than a 10x acceleration for the baseline switching functions. At the same time, it delivers high performance for secure tunneling protocols such as IPsec, GRE, NVGRE, VLAN and VxLAN. This enables service providers to achieve significant CAPEX and OPEX improvements which are not possible without data plane acceleration.”

The virtual switch acceleration delivered by 6WINDGate 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. 6WINDGate is also fully compatible with the OpenFlow protocol that is increasingly used in cloud and NFV networks.

6WIND, along with its ecosystem partners Big Switch and Ixia, will demonstrate its virtual switch acceleration capabilities in booth #401 at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) in Santa Clara, CA from April 15^th through 17^th. The demonstration configuration features the standard open-source Open vSwitch (OVS) running on an HP ProLiant server with two Intel Xeon processors. The 6WINDGate-accelerated OVS is controlled by a Big Switch Floodlight controller using OpenFlow protocols and utilizes an Ixia traffic generator to provide ten 10Gbps full-duplex traffic streams. The 6WINDGate-accelerated OVS switches traffic to achieve a rate of 60Mpps, providing a 10x improvement compared to a non-accelerated OVS.

“We are delighted that 6WIND has selected the Floodlight controller to showcase their OpenFlow compatibility,” said Mike Cohen, Director of Strategic Alliances at Big Switch Networks. "The 6WINDGate technology offers exciting performance characteristics applicable to a number of SDN use cases."

“We are pleased that 6WIND is using our traffic generator in their demonstration at ONS,” said Michael Haugh, Sr. Manager Market Development at Ixia. “Ixia is widely used in the development and testing of high-performance, OpenFlow-compatible networking products because of its industry leading IxNetwork solution providing intelligent flow grouping as well as flexible ingress/egress tracking per flow.  6WIND is addressing a unique challenge by increasing the performance of a virtual switch, reducing the performance trade-off of a software based switch. As experts in high-performance networking, 6WIND has used our products for many years.”

The 6WINDGate solution for virtual switch acceleration is available now. For more information please visit http://www.6wind.com.