| Industry | Software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2000 |
| Founder(s) | Eric Carmès |
| Headquarters |
Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France Mountain View, CA, Tokyo, Japan, Seoul, South Korea, Beijing, China |
| Area served | Global |
| Key people | Eric Carmès, Charlie Ashton, Franck Baudin, Pascal Delannoy, Richard D'Souza, Vincent Jardin, Matthew Kim, Tristan Pontet, Yann Rapaport |
| Products | 6WINDGate(TM) Software |
| Services | Design Consultation |
| Website | www.6wind.com |
6WIND S.A. is a privately held company that provides packet processing software used by OEM companies to meet both the wire-speed performance and time-to-market requirements of mobile infrastructure, network security, high-frequency trading and deep packet inspection applications. The company’s 6WINDGate™ technology is a portable software platform available on multiple multicore processor architectures and is optimized to leverage the capabilities of on-chip accelerators such as security offload. Using 6WINDGate can eliminate up to twelve months from product development cycles, improving an OEM’s time-to-market and meeting the growing demand for high-performance video and data-intensive applications. 6WIND is a based near Paris, France with offices in Mountain View, California, Tokyo, Japan, Seoul, South Korea and Beijing, China.[1]
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6WIND, founded in 2000, was created as a spin-out from Thales (previously Thomson-CSF), a provider of electronics products serving the aerospace, defense and security markets. Founder Eric Carmès’ vision for the company was to be the technology leader in the application of multicore processor architectures to networking software.
The company started with people experienced in IPv6 R&D which lead to the introduction in March 2001 of the 6WINDGate 6200 Series of Smart IPv6 Migration Routers. Initially a hardware and software solution, early 6WINDGate products were designed to ease IP network services deployment as companies migrated from IPv4 to IPv6 and make it easy for ISPs to set up new IPv6-based services.
Today, 6WINDGate is a software-only drop-in replacement for standard Operating System networking stacks. It typically provides up to 10x the packet processing performance[2] of a standard networking stack, improving the price-performance and power-performance ratios of networking equipment.
The company has an extensive IP portfolio based on the awarding of eight patents and various industry awards.[3][4]
Since its inception, 6WIND has received backing[5] from investors and shareholders, including Sofinnova Partners,[6] CDC Innovation, TechFund Europe[7] and US, ACE Management, and Thales.
To help foster innovation and entrepreneurship, 6WIND is a member of Systematic and OSEO Excellence.
6WIND is a privately owned company based Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France, a high-tech suburb of Paris, with a US subsidiary in Mountain View, California, sales and support offices in Tokyo, Japan and Seoul, South Korea, and an R&D center in Beijing, China.
6WIND partners with processor vendors including Cavium Networks, Freescale™ Semiconductor, Intel®, NetLogic Microsystems®, and Tilera® to port and integrate their networking protocols to the partner's multicore processor. These partnerships ensure that 6WINDGate is fully optimized for the Multicore Executives (MCEEs) that the processor vendors provide while also leveraging the capabilities of the on-chip accelerators included in their processor platforms such as security offload.
6WIND also partners with other vendors who offer complementary products including Mentor Graphics, MontaVista, Wind River, Metaswitch Networks and Qosmos.
Equipment vendors that provide boards and systems that utilize 6WIND software include Advantech,[8] Emerson Network Power,[9] GE Intelligent Platforms,[10][11] Interphase,[12] JumpGen Systems, Lanner, Narinet and RadiSys.[13]
6WIND offers 6WINDGate software and 6WIND Design Consultation services.
The 6WINDGate software acts as a framework between a multicore processor's execution environment and the application software that provides network services. 6WINDGate is compliant with standard Operating System APIs (such as Linux) and currently supports over 250 IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) network protocol standards.
The 6WINDGate networking stack is split into control plane and data plane layers. The data plane layer, also called the fast path, eliminates OS overhead by processesing the majority of incoming packets outside the OS environment. Only those packets that require complex processing are forwarded to the OS networking stack, which performs the necessary management, signaling and control functions.
Because splitting the networking stack in this way maintains standard OS application interfaces, there is no impact on the functionality of application software. Existing applications do not need to be rewritten or recertified, but they run significantly faster because the underlying packet processing is accelerated through the fast path environment.
6WIND’s Design Consultation service helps customer migrate their applications to multicore architectures and to architect them to take full advantage of multi-threaded technology.
Processors currently supported include: