6WIND, a “high-performance” networking software company, has announced general availability for its Mirantis certified 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel Plugin. 6WIND Virtual Accelerator is software that provides accelerated virtual switching and networking features for virtual infrastructures to enable Network Function Virtualization (NFV), data center virtualization and network appliance virtualization on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) servers.
Hypervisor bottlenecks within virtual infrastructures reduce software application performance, slowing adoption of NFV and limiting the scale of data centers and network appliances beyond 10G.
To solve these bottlenecks and provide cost-effective networking solutions, 6WIND Virtual Accelerator is installed on the hypervisor. It would deliver the required performance and functionality to NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), and data center and network appliance virtualization by bringing acceleration to Open vSwitch (OVS) and Linux bridge, and preserving standard Linux commands (tcpdump, iptables, IPsec/XFRM, etc.) for ease of deployment and operation.
Multiple Servers
Most virtual environments comprise tens, hundreds and even thousands of servers, making manual deployments for required acceleration a challenging task. With the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel Plugin, server installation is automated and simplified to pushing the ‘deploy’ button.
“Network Operators are leveraging Neutron within Mirantis OpenStack to create NFV infrastructures on x86 servers,” said Kamesh Pemmaraju, VP of Product Marketing, Mirantis. “With 6WIND’s Mirantis certified Fuel Plugin, customers now have a software solution to increase VNF performance and density with the click of a button.”
6WIND’s Virtual Accelerator Fuel Plugin provides OpenStack with a zero configuration and quick deployment of one of the fastest DPDK-based networking solutions without the limitations of SR-IOV or PCI pass-through that break virtualization.
6WIND Virtual Accelerator enhances virtual infrastructure with the following key features:
- Solution for high performance I/O leveraging DPDK, with multi-vendor NIC support
- Accelerated virtual switching (Open vSwitch and Linux bridge) and networking (Overlays, Filtering/NAT, IP Forwarding, IPsec) using the fastest packet processing algorithms
- Supports existing workloads through standard Virtio drivers
- Scalable software-based switching enables Service Chaining
“Performance and user experience are major considerations when leveraging OpenStack to transition from legacy hardware to software applications,” said Eric Carmès, CEO and Founder of 6WIND. “Mirantis certification of the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel Plugin gives the OpenStack user community confidence in a tested solution that scales server performance in a matter of minutes rather than days.”
