6WIND chalked up another customer win in its ongoing effort to replace virtual routers from Brocade with its own virtual routers.
Czech Republic-based JHComp switched out its Brocade Vyatta vRouters with 6WIND's 10G Turbo Routers. JHComp was able to deploy 6WIND's virtual routers, or vRouters, on the same SuperMicro white box servers that the Brocade software ran on.
Service providers and organizations have been left out in the cold by the lack of support for their Brocade Vyatta vRouters after AT&T bought Vyatta's network operating system and assets from Brocade in 2017. AT&T started using the Vyatta operating system internally for its own white box projects and discontinued support for customers who had bought it from Brocade.
AT&T has since folded the Vyatta network operating system into its disaggregated network operating system (dNOS). The Disaggregated Network Operating System open source project, which was based on dNOS, was formed by the Linux Foundation early last year.
RELATED: AT&T acquires Brocade’s Vyatta, bolsters SD-WAN, white box solution set
Sensing an opportunity to aid the stranded Brocade vRouter customers, 6WIND started a replacement program.
"We announced our replacement program in 2017," said 6WIND's Kelly LeBlanc, vice president of marketing, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We have done dozens of deals since launching this program."
Prior to making the switch, JHComp tested 6WIND's vRouter for features and performance in a border router configuration. The configuration test included a BGP link to upstream traffic and an OSPF link to downstream traffic, IPv4/IPv6 IP forwarding, dynamic routing, NAT and firewall. In the end, JHComp's testing led to the customer win for 6WIND over the previous Brocade installation.
"We selected 6WIND's vRouters to replace our Brocade Vyatta vRouters because 6WIND immediately solved our performance and stability issues while adding industry leading support," said Štěpán Železný, economic manager at JHComp, in a prepared statement. "With 6WIND vRouters, we have high performance software routers to meet our growing ISP demands while using our existing server infrastructure, without additional hardware investments."
6WIND replaced Brocade's vRouters last year for UVT Internet s. r. o., which is an internet service provider also based in the Czech Republic, and for USA-based Sovrn. It also replaced VyOS vRouters with 6WIND Turbo Routers for Arbor Networks last year.
6WIND's software-based border routers are available in bare metal and virtual machine configurations. The software packages are built with DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), which 6WIND managed as an open source community before it was put into the Linux Foundation two years ago. 6WIND, which was founded in 2000, also participates in other open source communities such as StrongSwan and the Free Range Routing Project.
"We have a very long and broad pedigree in software-based networking," LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc said 6WIND currently has around 70 employees, but she expects that number to grow over the next year or so.
For border routers, 6WIND competes against Cisco, MikroTik and Juniper Networks, while Cisco and Juniper both have virtual router implementations. 6WIND's last funding was by Cisco four years ago, but the company didn't disclose the amount.