Vincent Jardin, CTO of 6WIND, knows that incorporating general-purpose processors into telecom infrastructures enables companies to better meet their customers’ ever-increasing needs. "Right now, our customers are spending too much time on doing things that don’t support the main applications,” says Vincent. "Developers see that with this multi-core general-purpose processor approach, they can really focus efforts on the networking application [itself]. They don’t need to spend too much effort on re-inventing the data path."
According to Vincent, the industry is ready to move away from special-purpose network processors, but companies are eager to do so without sacrificing the performance and software architecture of applications they already have in place. "They want to keep Linux,” says Vincent, "but at the same time, they want to add some fast-path processing. So we implemented into the 6WINDGate™ what we call a ‘Cache Manager,’ running on Linux.” By minimizing the tweaking of the operating system code, 6WIND and Intel are able to integrate special-purpose applications directly into Linux, as well as into the multi-core processors and they can benefit from the performance of a fast path.
He feels that the integration of multi-core general-purpose processors will also generalize the skill sets necessary for telecom engineering. In the long term, utilizing multi-core processors will greatly reduce the complexity of working with many different special-purpose network processors: ”Our customers want to decrease the number of different hardware architectures they’re supporting and maintaining”.
They made their 6WINDGate™ SDS for Intel multi-core processors available to telecom companies in October 2007, and it didn’t require much convincing to get major companies on board. "They understood right away, and they’ve liked it. It’s the right path,” says Vincent.
Interest from telecom companies is already very high. "I noticed that, very quickly, they wanted to have more information,” says Vincent. "It’s very rare to see the big guys moving this fast."