Gone are the days when service providers and enterprises rely solely on standard hardware routers to optimize the performance and power of their networks. Today, thanks to technology advancements and virtualization, new solutions like virtual routers (vRouters) are gradually replacing hardware routers to help enterprises and service providers boost their application performance, mitigate security vulnerabilities, lower costs, and more.
But what exactly are vRouters and why should modern enterprises, network vendors, and cloud service providers add these cutting-edge solutions to their network infrastructure arsenal?
SourceForge recently caught up with Kelly LeBlanc, the VP of Marketing at 6WIND, to discuss the role of vRouters in optimizing network performance. LeBlanc also shared with us how 6WIND vRouters empower today’s enterprises and service providers by delivering security, scalability, and flexibility benefits while cutting costs.
Q: Can you please tell us more about 6WIND. What is your core technology and what challenges do you seek to solve?
Kelly LeBlanc, the VP of Marketing at 6WIND
A: 6WIND is a software company with a focus on high-performance networking. Our mission is to give service providers and enterprise customers a software alternative to expensive hardware routers, security gateways, and other proprietary networking equipment. We provide the performance required to run routing and security in our software on white box servers. We believe that the future of networking is software on commodity servers and we’ve been helping to give customers their independence from expensive networking hardware for over a decade.
Q: One technology that helps cloud service providers bring significant hardware optimization while reducing hardware costs is Virtual Routers (vRouters). For individuals who are unfamiliar with vRouters, can you provide a brief overview in the simplest of terms?
A: In the simplest terms, a vRouter is a software router, packaged in the form of a software appliance. It is available in bare metal and virtual machine (VM) configurations and runs on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. vRouters are designed to replace hardware routers to take advantage of cost savings, networking flexibility, and the promise of virtualization.
Q: How do vRouters replace hardware routers? And how does this technology integrate with standard Linux tools?
A: vRouters replace hardware routers by delivering the required performance and features in software running on COTS servers versus proprietary hardware. A key ingredient here is performance whereby, historically, hardware was required to meet throughput and high availability requirements for critical routing and security applications, at a significant expense. But today, thanks to innovations in Linux networking and the DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) technology that improves packet processing performance for multicore architectures, software is fully capable to do the job with costs savings over 50% versus hardware.
6WIND’s design philosophy is to preserve and co-exist with Linux, so that customers can use their existing Linux tools for everything from control to management if preferred. For example, if a customer wants to leverage its Linux control plane, that is fine. If a customer wants to use standard Linux commands such as iproute2, iptables, ethtool, tcpdump, etc. to configure networking, that is fine too. And for non-Linux users, a user-friendly CLI is also available.
Q: Why did 6WIND create its vRouters?
A: 6WIND created its vRouters to give customers the first real high-performance software alternative to hardware routers. We license our vRouters according to throughput requirements, with software packages for 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 40 and 100 Gbps of throughput. For our IPsec VPN vRouters, we offer the same throughput packages and match them with a number of supported secure tunnels. So, for 1 Gbps throughput we support 1,000 secure tunnels, and for 100 Gbps throughput, we support 100,000 secure tunnels and so forth. The ability to achieve such high IPsec VPN performance has awarded us customers such as AT&T, a leading industry innovator in leveraging software for its networking services.
Q: What are the main use cases of your vRouters?
A: 6WIND focuses on four vRouter solutions that cover the main use cases, namely routing, security, hypervisor acceleration, and build-your-own. We have service providers, enterprises and network equipment providers who leverage 6WIND’s vRouters for each of these cases. To best illustrate them, here are some examples:
vRouters for Secure Multi-Site, Multi-Cloud Networks
For routing, we recently announced a press release with a Spanish ISP who replaced its Cisco and MikroTik hardware routers with 6WIND’s 40G vRouter for core routing. In this case, Minorisa, the ISP, required high-performance routers with BGP, OSPF, LAG, VLAN, filtering, and high availability features to connect directly to its service provider networks for 40G upstream and downstream traffic to support its data centers. This core router use case is fully served with 6WIND software on COTS servers.
For security, we offer high-performance IPsec VPN solutions for secure site-to-site connectivity between cloud data centers and sites, again all in software. AT&T built its virtual VPN gateway service called vVIG with 6WIND vRouter technology.
For hypervisor acceleration, our vRouters accelerate the hypervisor virtual switch so that virtual infrastructure can replace hardware such as ASICs and FPGAs to run high performance virtual machine-based applications. OEMs such as Kontron and Nuage leverage our vRouters in their virtual infrastructure.
Finally, customers can “build-their-own” vRouters with 6WIND source code. To give two examples, Italian Service Provider EOLO built its own SDN Routers with 6WIND software instead of purchasing Cisco routers for its Ultra-broadband Internet Services. Next, Mavenir, a US network equipment provider, integrates 6WIND software in its equipment for mobile network infrastructure.
For each of these cases, customers reduced costs while gaining additional control of their network thanks to software. This is a very attractive vRouter value proposition for service providers, enterprises, and network equipment providers.
Q: As the market leader in vRouter technology, how do you manage vRouters?
A: 6WIND’s vRouters provide both traditional, CLI-based management and IT management based on automation and integration with high-level orchestration tools. For this, 6WIND vRouter proposes YANG-based NETCONF APIs. We also support standard Linux APIs such as iproute and iptables. Configuration can happen through Linux, the CLI and APIs for integration with third-party management tools and orchestrators.
Finally, for Monitoring, we support the traditional SNMP and syslog mechanisms, plus telemetry through sFlow and graphical analytics (Grafana) with time series database, including pre-integration with InfluxDB and Grafana. Our data models leverage YANG and are therefore easily understandable and extensible.
Q: Do you use any open source projects with your vRouters?
A: 6WIND founded DPDK.org, which is the open source project, now within The Linux Foundation, that provides a packet processing framework for high-performance networking. We build our vRouter products on top of DPDK and this is how we achieve our industry-leading performance. We also support other major open source initiatives for advanced, high-performance networking such as FR Routing (FRR), which 6WIND co-founded, and strongSwan. We also contribute to other open source projects such as QEMU and OpenStack to provide a seamless integration of our vRouter products with management platforms. 6WIND engineers are seasoned experts and are also contributing to the Linux networking stack.
Q: Can you explain the difference between 6WIND’s appliance and source code vRouter offerings?
A: 6WIND’s vRouter appliances are ready-to-use software appliances for customers to deploy and consume. Our vRouter appliances are called Turbo Router, Turbo IPsec and Virtual Accelerator. 6WIND’s vRouter source code offering is called 6WINDGate. Customers who select 6WINDGate pick from a list of networking modules to build their own vRouters and additional networking solutions. As you would expect, all 6WIND vRouter appliances are built using 6WINDGate source code and this is one of our key advantages. 6WINDGate source code is the foundation for some of the most successful OEM networking products, and largest networks, in the world.
Q: What makes 6WIND’s vRouter Solution stand out from other products in the market?
A: 6WIND leads the market with performance. This is how we are able to replace hardware routers with vRouters for core routers, edge routers, and security gateways. We were the first company to offer 12 million packets per second of IP routing per core, and 18 Gbps throughput per core of IPsec performance on an x86 server. Our software scales linearly with the number of cores, so if you need more performance, simply apply more cores to our vRouters. We were also first to offer our vRouter solutions on both x86 and Arm servers. Management is also a major differentiator. Linux users are always pleased to learn they can continue using the Linux tools they are comfortable with. We also have a traditional CLI. We developed next-generation management frameworks based on YANG for APIs that integrate with third-party management tools and orchestrators. We have no interest to lock our customers into hardware, and this also applies to our open and flexible management options.
Q: Looking ahead, what key trends, new technologies, and/or challenges are you seeing that will impact the network software industry? How is 6WIND addressing these head on?
A: vRouters are critical pieces of infrastructure for many new software-defined architectures. For example, if you take an SD-WAN, uCPE, vBNG or vCG-NAT where turn-key solutions are offered in software to replace hardware, vRouters are core underlying technologies. OEMs who are building these solutions contact us to increase performance for routing, security or hypervisor acceleration within these applications. When we say “Speed Matters for vRouters” we speak not just to Service Providers and Enterprises who deploy our software appliances, but also to OEMs who are trying to lead the market with the best products. Performance has always been a challenge to keep pace with network growth and it will continue to be.
About 6WIND
6WIND’s networking software solves performance and time-to-market challenges for Service Providers, Enterprises and OEMs. The company’s flagship vRouter technology is available in software appliance, source code, and hypervisor networking form factors optimized for cost-effective hardware, such as Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) servers. 6WIND is based near Paris, France with regional offices in China and the United States. For more information visit: http://www.6wind.com.