6WIND was founded in 2000 as a spin-out from
Thales Group (previously
Thomson-CSF), a provider of electronics for aerospace, defense and security. A 3.75 million euro investment from
Sofinnova Partners and others was announced in 2004, and 5 million euros in 2004. Partners include
Red Hat,
VMware and
Wind River Systems. Equipment vendors that provide boards and systems utilizing 6WIND software include
Emerson Network Power. Other partners include: Kalray for
data centers,
Hewlett-Packard for acceleration technology on
ProLiant servers,
Dell,
Canonical,
Alcatel-Lucent for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In April 2013, the company announced it would support an
open-source software project for the
Data Plane Development Kit from
Intel. In early 2012, 6WIND introduced a mobile edition and cloud edition of 6WINDGate, for
4G mobile phone companies and
cloud computing. The company announced its Speed Series of packaged software in late 2014, marketed for
network function virtualization (NFV). A product called
6WIND Virtual Accelerator allowing hypervisor scaling. A
venture capital investment from
Cisco Systems was announced in 2014. In 2015, the company announced its Turbo Router Turbo IPsec software. In 2016
Radware said that their Aleon NG VA product used a product of the company along with
OpenStack. That same year
Mirantis announced integration with 6WIND for data centers and NFV. The company promotes its performance by publishing performance tests. In 2015
Light Reading mentioned that 6WIND software allowed Italian service provider
NGI to build a router marketed for
software-defined networking. In August 2017, 6WIND announced a "replacement program" for
Brocade users. 6WIND is based on
DPDK traffic runs in the fast path outside of the Linux kernel, avoiding potential Linux kernel processing bottlenecks. This announcement has been followed by two articles from
The Register and
SDxCentral comparing 6WIND with dedicated equipment and explaining how the solution helped a Spanish ISP to become SDN ready. In November 2022, 6WIND announced a strategic partnership with IP-Tribe in APAC. == See also ==