6WIND and Cavium extend partnership

6WIND and Cavium’s extended partnership includes 6WINDGate support for the Cavium solutions such as LiquidIO and NITROX adaptors as well as OCTEON and Thunder multi-core SoCs to deliver the single high performance data path required to seamlessly and cost effectively transition to virtualized and software-based NFV and SDN architectures.

CAVIUM LiquidIO Intelligent Network Adaptors:
6WIND and Cavium have established a strategic development partnership to leverage 6WINDGate’s common data path offload from x86 to LiquidIO using the Intel® DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) API to significantly increase application performance. The same software can be deployed across multiple ISA based host server platforms. LiquidIO adaptors efficiently offload virtual switching and additional functionality such as security and deep packet inspection (DPI) functionality. 6WINDGate will enable smart NIC offloading while sustaining line rate traffic loads.

CAVIUM OCTEON III and Thunder ARMv8 64-bit System on a Chip (SoC) Processors:
6WIND and Cavium will deliver joint technology to power leading edge multicore SoC packet processors by providing 6WINDGate on Cavium SoC platforms to enable complete NFV and SDN solutions. Cavium’s optimized multicore processors integrate hardware accelerators for application processing and virtualization functionality, resulting in high throughput line rates for virtualized applications.

CAVIUM NITROX Security Processors:
6WINDGate integrates NITROX security adaptors to be used as a cryptography offload and acceleration option with DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) software, providing a ready to use fast path IPsec networking stack for x86 servers without the need to modify existing Linux applications.
“We are proud to have worked with Cavium for many years to continue to deliver high performance network applications for leading OEMs worldwide,” said Vincent Jardin, CTO for 6WIND. “By enabling Cavium’s customers to share their existing data plane infrastructure across multiple platforms with common software we are accelerating the open networking transformation towards NFV and SDN.”

“The extended Cavium and 6WIND partnership will enable our joint customers to take further advantage of their Cavium hardware and bring new designs for SDN and NFV to market quickly,” said Raghib Hussain, Corporate VP/GM & CTO for Cavium. “Many existing applications utilize Cavium optimized multicore processors. This partnership will expand the market and deployment models for Cavium SoCs across both standalone and offload/acceleration scenarios while delivering high performance and a seamless path to application virtualization.”

Performance and Latency Matter with the Transition to NFV and SDN
Organizations are developing the next generation of their application infrastructure toward NFV and SDN by leveraging Linux with standard platform ecosystems. With this evolution, there remain performance challenges to ensure that the new virtualized platforms can obtain the same performance as the previous dedicated, physical platforms.

6WIND and Cavium have extensive experience delivering high performance applications to joint customers. For example with 6WIND’s existing PMD supporting Intel® DPDK with Cavium NITROX security processors, customers can obtain 20 Gbps IPsec performance per NITROX III processor, and multiple NITROX III processors can be stacked and leveraged by 6WINDGate’s fast path for IPsec.

6WINDGate enables a single software platform across Cavium and x86 technology, allowing customers to achieve the required high performance in physical and virtual environments. This allows customers to share a common software architecture when both architectures include Cavium acceleration engines.