6WIND, a high-performance networking software company, today announced it will work with Canonical to help customers accelerate cloud networking on Ubuntu. 6WIND Virtual Accelerator has been validated on Canonical's Ubuntu platform and both companies are working together to integrate 6WIND Virtual Accelerator with Canonical's Juju. Juju is a service orchestration tool that enables Ubuntu users to quickly model, configure, deploy and manage entire cloud environments with only a few commands. Customers can leverage Juju to deploy hundreds of pre-configured services, OpenStack or their own code to any public or private cloud.

6WIND Virtual Accelerator is a software package that deploys transparently within Linux's KVM hypervisor domain on x86 servers to accelerate virtual infrastructure so that Virtual Machine (VM) based application performance approaches bare metal while remaining hardware independent. Virtual Accelerator removes performance bottlenecks in the virtual networking infrastructure with support for Open vSwitch, Linux bridge, multi-tenancy, security, filtering and guest processing offloads. It reduces CPU resources necessary for packet processing in the hypervisor so that more cores are available for applications.

The integration of 6WIND Virtual Accelerator and Juju will allow Canonical's Ubuntu community to create cloud networks with high application throughput for demanding use cases such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined Networking (SDN). With Virtual Accelerator, application throughput increases without any additional hardware or techniques such as SR-IOV, preserving the benefits of virtual networking such as cost savings, portability and flexibility.

"Canonical's Ubuntu is a market leading Linux distribution, which many of our customers leverage to create their public and private clouds," said Eric Carmes, CEO and Founder of 6WIND. "By integrating 6WIND Virtual Accelerator with Juju our joint customers will benefit from high performance virtual applications without any change to the OS or infrastructure and full commercial support from both companies."

"We are pleased to work with 6WIND to integrate Juju with 6WIND Virtual Accelerator," said John Zannos, VP of Cloud Alliances at Canonical. "6WIND's expertise in NFV, SDN and data center acceleration will help our customers deploy highly scalable Ubuntu cloud networks."