6WIND, a high-performance networking software company, today announced benchmark results by SDxCentral, which investigated the performance of 6WIND's Speed Series family on x86 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server platforms. The Speed Series products include Turbo Appliances with 6WIND Turbo Router and 6WIND Turbo IPsec, which are software appliances deployed in bare metal environments and as virtual machines (VMs), and 6WIND Virtual Accelerator, which provides packet processing acceleration for virtual network infrastructures including Open vSwitch (OVS) and Linux bridging.

6WIND's Speed Series products are designed to benefit Service Providers, Cloud and Content Providers and Enterprises with the best price/performance ratios when transitioning from hardware to software based appliances for flexibility, efficiency and cost savings. Compared to competing software routers, 6WIND's Turbo Router can deliver up to twice the performance at 1/4 the price. Compared to hardware-based IPsec Gateways, 6WIND's Turbo IPsec can save 80% of the cost per gigabit of IPsec throughput. With 6WIND Virtual Accelerator, wire speed virtual infrastructure performance can be achieved on a single server with 80% of the processing cores left to run Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or virtual appliances inside VMs.

SDxCentral's benchmarks first validate 6WIND Turbo Router and Turbo IPsec performance in bare metal deployments to demonstrate how they can achieve the highest performance to assist customers in their migration from dedicated, purpose-built network appliances. Next they are deployed as VMs on top of 6WIND Virtual Accelerator in the hypervisor domain to enable NFV and data center virtualization with performance that rivals physical equipment while reducing processor resources. All tests were conducted on a commercial x86 server fitted with dual 12-core Xeon Haswell Processors (E5-2680v3) to validate L3 forwarding performance, routing control-plane scalability, IPsec performance and control-plane scalability compared to standard Linux equivalents.

Highlights of the benchmarks include:

6WIND Turbo Router

• Bare Metal:
  • 12x10 Gbps wire speed L3 forwarding performance is achieved in both packets per second with small packet sizes and gigabits per second (Gbps) with Internet Mix (IMIX) traffic
  • More than 50 times Linux performance in the same conditions
• Virtual Deployment:
  • More than 80 Gbps IMIX performance
  • Linux remains below 10 Gbps

6WIND Turbo IPsec

• Bare Metal:
  • 70 Gbps of IPsec data plane processing, which is the maximum capacity of the traffic generator and more than 5x Linux
  • 240,000 concurrent tunnels, which is 8x Linux
  • Tunnel setup rate of 12,000 tunnels/second, which is 48x Linux
• Virtual Deployment:
  • More than 50 Gbps IMIX performance
  • Linux is barely above 1 Gbps

"Our tests confirm that 6WIND Speed Series can deliver over 50x Linux performance for software appliances on x86 servers that rival specialized hardware," Roy Chua, Co-Founder and Partner, SDxCentral. "6WIND Turbo Router and Turbo IPsec also support Linux-based configurations, which is a great advantage for the growing population of professional users who already have their own management tools and are accustomed to Linux. In virtual environments, combining 6WIND Turbo Appliances with 6WIND Virtual Accelerator removes common virtual switch performance bottlenecks so that performance approaches bare metal."

"6WIND Speed Series bring an alternative to expensive specialized hardware and competing software-based solutions on x86 servers positioned for NFV, data center or enterprise cloud deployments," said Eric Carmes, CEO and Founder of 6WIND. "Our bare metal and virtual machine options deliver a unique price/performance value proposition for modern networking and security requirements."