6WIND () is a virtual networking software company delivering disaggregated and cloud-native solutions to CSPs and enterprises globally. The company is privately held and headquartered in the West

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

area, in

Montigny-le-Bretonneux Montigny-le-Bretonneux () is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is located in the south-western suburbs of Paris, from the centre of Paris, in the " new town" of Saint-Quentin-en-Yveli ...

. 6WIND has a global presence with offices in the US and APAC. The company provides virtualized networking software which is deployed in bare-metal or in virtual machines on COTS servers in public & private clouds. Their solutions are disaggregated and containerized based on the cloud-native architecture.

History

6WIND was founded in 2000 as a spin-out from

Thales Group Thales S.A., Trade name, trading as Thales Group (), is a French multinational corporation, multinational aerospace and defence industry, defence corporation specializing in electronics. It designs, develops and manufactures a wide variety of aer ...

(previously

Thomson-CSF Thomson-CSF was a French company that specialized in the development and manufacture of electronics with a heavy focus upon the aerospace and defence sectors of the market. Thomson-CSF was formed in 1968 following the merger of Thomson-Hous ...

), 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 Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, VMware and

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, Inc., also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems sof ...

.Wind River, 6Wind partner on multicore CPUs
''EE Times'', January 14, 2008. Equipment vendors that provide boards and systems utilizing 6WIND software include

Emerson Network Power Emerson may refer to: People * Emerson (surname), a surname (and list of people with that name) * Emerson (given name), a given name (and list of people with that name) * Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American philosopher and essayist Places Australia ...

. Other partners include: Kalray for

data center A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for busines ...

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

for acceleration technology on ProLiant servers,

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean 'according to the canon' the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, ''canonical exampl ...

Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel-Lucent S.A. () was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France. The company focused on Fixed line telephone, fixed, Mobile phone, mobile and telecommunications convergence, ...

for

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

. In April 2013, the company announced it would support an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

project for the

Data Plane Development Kit The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from ...

from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

. In early 2012, 6WIND introduced a mobile edition and cloud edition of 6WINDGate, for 4G mobile phone companies and

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

. The company announced its Speed Series of packaged software in late 2014, marketed for

network function virtualization Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and de ...

(NFV). A product called ''6WIND Virtual Accelerator'' allowing hypervisor scaling. A

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

investment from

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

was announced in 2014. In 2015, the company announced its Turbo Router Turbo IPsec software. In 2016

Radware Radware Ltd. is an American provider of cybersecurity and application delivery products for physical, cloud and software-defined data centers. Radware's corporate headquarters are located in Mahwah, New Jersey. The company also has offices in E ...

said that their Aleon NG VA product used a product of the company along with

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...

. 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 Light Reading Inc. is a telecommunications industry information company based in New York City. Its activities include publishing, data analysis, market research, and events management. History The company was founded in 2000 by Stephen Saunders ...

mentioned that 6WIND software allowed Italian service provider NGI to build a router marketed for

software-defined networking Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to network management that uses abstraction to enable dynamic and programmatically efficient network configuration to create grouping and segmentation while improving network performance and monit ...

. In August 2017, 6WIND announced a "replacement program" for

Brocade Brocade () is a class of richly decorative shuttle (weaving), shuttle-woven fabrics, often made in coloured silks and sometimes with gold and silver threads. The name, related to the same root as the word "broccoli", comes from Italian langua ...

users. 6WIND is based on

DPDK The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from ...

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 ''The Register'' (often also called El Reg) is a British Technology journalism, technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee (journalist), Mike Magee and John Lettice. The online newspaper's Nameplate_(publishing), masthead Logo, s ...

and

SDxCentral SDxCentral is a United States–based technology journalism and market data research company based in Denver, Colorado. The company was founded in 2012 as SDNCentral focused on Software Defined Network, and changed its name to SDxCentral in 2 ...

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.

References

{{Reflist Software companies of France Networking companies French companies established in 2000

History

See also

References