SCIENCE

6WIND announced an extension to its 6WINDGate product portfolio that addresses the increasing challenge of performance stress on the application infrastructure for cloud computing. 6WIND has added TCP termination to the comprehensive set of protocols supported by their fast path technology, typically delivering a 10x improvement in throughput over OS-based end point processing. 6WIND’s high-performance TCP termination protocol represents the first of a range of solutions to support and accelerate the application and content delivery functions essential to cloud computing.

As both consumers and businesses continue to shift their computing and storage workloads to virtualized appliances in the cloud, the overriding performance challenge for cloud equipment suppliers has evolved from stress on the network infrastructure to stress on the application infrastructure. In order to meet customers’ expectations for responsiveness while at the same time optimizing their own ROI, operators need to accelerate the performance of cloud-based applications and dynamically optimize the utilization of data center resources. TCP termination is a key technology for addressing the performance challenge for critical cloud applications such as WAN optimization which compresses and optimizes TCP sessions, thereby maximizing the utilization of WAN bandwidth.

Another example is the acceleration of a large number of NFS (Network File System) sessions within cloud storage systems. Combined with the DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) and packet processing features within 6WINDGate, TCP termination is used within application servers running TCP, HTTP or HTTPs to offload protocol processing and maximize throughput.

“6WIND’s new range of protocol termination solutions, such as the TCP termination protocol announced today, enables cloud infrastructure equipment manufacturers to maximize the ROI for their products,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “By adding these protocols to DPI and the comprehensive set of packet processing features already available in the 6WINDGate portfolio, 6WIND ensures the acceleration of a wide range of workloads in virtualized appliances, optimizing both cost-performance and energy efficiency at the system level.”

Already deployed by tier-1 OEMs worldwide, 6WINDGate is the gold standard for commercial packet processing software used in cloud computing, enterprise networking and telecom infrastructure and is fully optimized for market-leading multicore platforms from Cavium Networks, Freescale, Intel, NetLogic Microsystems and Tilera.

6WIND’s TCP termination protocol is available now, while additional solutions for cloud infrastructure equipment are in development and will be announced at a later date.