SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- 6WIND, a high-performance software company, today announced its partnership with EZchip Semiconductor Ltd. a leader in high-performance processing solutions for networking, and NGI SpA, a leading Internet Service Provider based in Italy, to build a high performance routing platform. NGI delivers ultra-broadband wireless Internet access via "EOLO", its wholly owned wireless network, and was in need of industry-proven innovative technology for its next-generation network architecture. NGI selected 6WINDGate™ packet processing software and EZchip's TILE-Gx multicore processors (from EZchip's recent acquisition of Tilera) to build a custom Software-Defined Network (SDN) appliance, which will enable quick delivery of Internet access to its customers.
Building a Software-defined Nationwide Wireless Network
To ensure continuous growth and scalability to its "EOLO" wireless network, NGI decided to engineer an SDN appliance, tailor-made to its own requirements. This technology will also enable the company to expand its network to four new Italian regions that are lagging behind the EU schedule for broadband Internet availability. NGI plans to deploy an SDN appliance at each of the existing radio towers spread across Northern and Central Italy, while thousands of new towers will continue to be built over the coming years. NGI selected EZchip's TILE-Gx 72-core processors and 6WINDGate packet processing software to reduce the time to market in building its high quality network by providing ready-to-use networking software with the right feature set and performance, including data, control and management planes.
In NGI's redundant and distributed architecture, 6WINDGate provides fast userspace services directly on the network edge (i.e. radio towers) such as PPPoE termination, routing and L2/L3 QoS. Additionally, 6WIND enabled NGI to provide application-aware QoS with a userspace-optimized version of Open vSwitch. OpenFlow is also leveraged to allow for a centralized management system, integrated in NGI's existing management interface thanks to 6WINDGate's XML-based management plane. 6WINDGate high performance networking software is running on top of TILE-Gx, leveraging TILE-Gx's unprecedented core-count of up to 72 cores per chip and unmatched per-watt performance.
"The time has come for software to dominate the Telco market," said Giacomo Bernardi, CTO of NGI. "We selected 6WIND's networking software with EZchip's many-core processor after a year-long survey of existing solutions from world-class vendors. 6WIND and EZchip are the ground we will build and innovate on."
6WIND
EZchip Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: EZCH)