6WIND is a virtual networking software company delivering disaggregated and cloud-native solutions to CSPs and enterprises globally. The company is privately held and headquartered in the West

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

area, in Montigny-le-Bretonneux. 6WIND has a global presence with offices in the US and APAC. The company provides virtualized networking software which is deployed in bare-metal or in virtual machines on COTS servers in public & private clouds. Their solutions are disaggregated and containerized based on the cloud-native architecture.

History

6WIND was founded in 2000 as a spin-out from

Thales Group Thales Group () is a French multinational company that designs, develops and manufactures electrical systems as well as devices and equipment for the aerospace, defence, transportation and security sectors. The company is headquartered in Paris' ...

(previously

Thomson-CSF Thomson-CSF was a French company that specialized in the development and manufacture of electronics with a heavy focus upon the aerospace and defence sectors of the market. Thomson-CSF was formed in 1968 following the merger of Thomson-Houst ...

), a provider of electronics for aerospace, defense and security. A 3.75 million euro investment from

Sofinnova Partners Sofinnova is the name shared by two venture capital firms, Sofinnova Partners and Sofinnova Ventures. The name Sofinnova is a contraction of the French, "Société de Financement de l’Innovation" or, Innovation Venture Capital Company. Both fi ...

and others was announced in 2004, and 5 million euros in 2004. Partners include

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

and

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, ...

.EETimes
" Wind River, 6Wind partner on multicore CPUs"
January 14, 2008. Equipment vendors that provide boards and systems utilizing 6WIND software include Emerson Network Power. Other partners include: Kalray for

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

for acceleration technology on

ProLiant ProLiant is a brand of server computers that was originally developed and marketed by Compaq and currently marketed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. After Compaq merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP), HP retired its NetServer brand in favor of the P ...

servers,

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean "according to the canon" the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, "canonical example ...

Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a su ...

for

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

. In April 2013, the company announced it would support an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

project for the

Data Plane Development Kit The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing f ...

from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

. In early 2012, 6WIND introduced a mobile edition and cloud edition of 6WINDGate, for 4G mobile phone companies and

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

. The company announced its Speed Series of packaged software in late 2014, marketed for

network function virtualization Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and ...

(NFV). A product called ''6WIND Virtual Accelerator'' allowing hypervisor scaling. A

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

investment from

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

was announced in 2014. In 2015, the company announced its Turbo Router Turbo IPsec software. In 2016

Radware Radware Inc. is an American provider of cybersecurity and application delivery products for physical, cloud and software-defined data centers. Radware's corporate headquarters are located in Mahwah, New Jersey. The company also has offices in Eur ...

said that their Aleon NG VA product used a product of the company along with

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...

. That same year

Mirantis Mirantis Inc. is a Campbell, California, based B2B open source cloud computing software and services company. Its primary container and cloud management products, part of the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform suite of products, are Mirantis Contain ...

announced integration with 6WIND for data centers and NFV. The company promotes its performance by publishing performance tests. In 2015

Light Reading Light Reading Inc. is a telecommunications industry information company based in New York City. Its activities include publishing, data analysis, market research, and events management. History The company was founded in 2000 by Stephen Saunders ...

mentioned that 6WIND software allowed Italian service provider NGI to build a router marketed for

software-defined networking Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing t ...

. In August 2017, 6WIND announced a "replacement program" for

Brocade Brocade is a class of richly decorative shuttle-woven fabrics, often made in colored silks and sometimes with gold and silver threads. The name, related to the same root as the word "broccoli", comes from Italian ''broccato'' meaning "embos ...

users. 6WIND is based on

DPDK The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing f ...

traffic runs in the fast path outside of the Linux kernel, avoiding potential Linux kernel processing bottlenecks. This announcement has been followed by two articles from

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

and SDxCentral comparing 6WIND with dedicated equipment and explaining how the solution helped a Spanish ISP to become SDN ready.

References

{{Reflist Software companies of France

History

See also

References