6WIND Launches Solution to Enable Simplified Networking Scalability and Performance for IP-based Telecommunications and Enterprise Applications

The solution provides a seamless migration path to multicore with no performance penalties. 6WINDPath features 6WIND’s 6WINDGate embedded software solution – used by two-thirds of tier one telecommunications equipment manufacturers worldwide – combined with 6WIND’s market-leading expertise to provide expert design support and services and high performance embedded networking functions using multicore technology while ensuring a flawless integration with existing IP- based applications.

6WINDPath is a packaged solution to allow telecommunications and enterprises equipment manufacturers to scale performance so applications can work optimally despite any sized network traffic growth. This is possible without requiring applications to be repurposed as 6WINDPath creates simplified migration paths for applications to run on multicore-based architectures that provide the only capable intelligence and performance needed to meet today’s and future network traffic growth requirements. Using multicore technology within the most appropriate scenarios to minimize impact on existing architectures, designers can offload networking requirements to multicore technology, enabling them to ensure maximum performance of IP applications in line with any network traffic.

6WINDPath is an easy to install and easy to use end-to-end solution. 6WINDPath ensures any existing application running on single-core architectures, using a standard Linux networking stack, can be made to seamlessly and transparently work on a multicore-based architecture. Using 6WINDPath, designers can work from three typical migration path scenarios:
• Add a high speed packet processing front end to offload the application processor.
• Add a high speed packet processing front end and load balance the traffic to several application processors.
• Migrate an existing application to a multicore architecture by dedicating a certain number of cores to packet processing.

6WINDPath leverages two major strengths – 6WIND’s market-leading expertise that includes strong field-proven knowledge in multicore, and 6WIND’s 6WINDGate embedded software solutions – to ensure specific results when scaling applications using multicore technology to meet today’s and tomorrow’s network growth requirements.

Specifically designed for high performance applications, 6WINDPath is ideally suited for a myriad of applications: security gateways; UTM appliances; IPTV; content inspection; IMS; VoIP and ToIP; wireless (3G, WiMAX, LTE, etc.); billing systems; and more. 6WINDPath is a modular solution, allowing customer flexibility in selecting any desired IP functionalities. 6WINDPath includes 6WIND design consultation, services and support for customers to define a clear and cost-effective path to move applications to run on multicore technology.

Designers can then benefit from advanced networking performance, application integration and more, yielded by 6WINDGate, to include support for multi 10 Gbps Ethernet links.

“Telecommunications and enterprise networks continue to move to all-IP-based equipment, applications and services to benefit from simplified architectures and cost advantages,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “Traditional equipment cannot sustain the mandatory 10G+ networking performance required for today’s IP-based world.

6WIND Launches 6WINDPath for Multicore Designing 2-2-2-2
Multicore technology provides the sophisticated and powerful hardware layer needed to offload networking performance concerns. As a consequence, the software IP layer implemented in equipment handling this bandwidth is business critical and necessary to ensure business success. Combining 6WIND’s expertise and technology, 6WINDPath is the simplest and best solution to ensure applications cost-effectively maximize performance using multicore architectures.”

6WINDPath uses 6WINDGate’s ready-to-implement and complete layer 2 – layer 4 networking functionalities, which as a result hides multicore complexity and can cut networking design times by as much as 70 percent. This simplified migration to multicore architectures also maximizes software reuse – requiring no repurposing of existing applications – with no performance penalties. It provides a modular set of embedded software features, optimized for multicore and is delivered with a complete XML-based management solution including, an industry standard command line interface (CLI) and Web management toolset.

Networking functionalities specifically designed for multicore include:
• IP Forwarding and Routing (including Virtual Routing)
• IP Reassembly
• L2 - VLAN, GRE, Bridging, Link Aggregation, GTP, PPP, L2TP
• ECMP
• VRRP
• IPsec using crypto engines, IKEv1/IKEv2
• IP Filtering
• NAT
• Flow Inspection
• TCP Offload
• IP QoS
• IP Multicast
• IPv6 Ready (Forwarding, Tunneling, Transition, IPsec, QoS, Reassembly, Filtering, Multicast)

To provide further details on migration scenarios, 6WINDPath features and more, a 6WINDPath application note is available at the following link. Regardless of the migration path taken, 6WIND’s 6WINDPath solution allows designers to confidently offload all network traffic concerns to 6WINDGate embedded software, no matter the design requirements. Used by two-thirds of tier one telecommunications equipment providers, 6WINDGate technology has been ported and validated on all market-leading multicore platforms and is available on market-leading boards.