Background

6Wind has announced support for ARM CPUs in a briefing released today, Link in the show notes.

Link: 6WIND Announces Arm® Processor Support for High Performance Networking – http://www.6wind.com/news-events/press-releases-2017/6wind-press-october-10-2017/ 

Many people in networking may not have heard of 6Wind but their software is inside many Enterprise and carrier devices. They often license the software as a component that is widely used by branded networking vendors. The main focus in IPsec and SSL VLAN but the software is packet processing engine that can be used for many tasks. Its often used in SD-WAN products today

6WIND software scales across networking architectures with a choice of bare metal and virtual machine (VM) deployments:

* Server with standard NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers

* Server with Smart NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers and Arm and MIPS support for Smart NICs

* Appliance: x86, Arm and MIPS support

Why You Care ? 

Lots of vendors are moving their applications into virtual appliances. Its taken a long time for people to accept that a VM is acceptable. Now we are seeing diversity in CPU architecture.

I don’t see Enterprise using ARM for a while, thats probably too scary for most people,  but 6Wind has been strong in the custom device market for quite some time. So I expect this to be attractive there.