6WIND announced a replacement program for customers seeking an alternative to Brocade’s vRouter, which has now been sold to AT&T. AT&T purchased the vRouter for its own internal use. On Oct. 5, it’s discontinuing support of the product for other customers.

“When we looked at the announcement for end of sale and support, we noticed there was no recommendation for replacement,” said Kelly LeBlanc, 6WIND’s VP of marketing.

6WIND is grabbing this opportunity to market its Turbo Router software to Brocade vRouter customers. It’s unknown how many of these customers there are. But LeBlanc said, “One of the reasons we put together this program is because we have received phone calls. It became obvious people needed a place to go.”

The Turbo Router software can be deployed in bare metal environments or as a virtual machine running on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. It includes routing and firewall features with an additional option to create IPsec VPNs.

Turbo Router is based on the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), a software toolkit that moves traffic outside of the Linux kernel so the traffic can move faster.

“6WIND has been working with Intel to champion DPDK for the last four years,” said LeBlanc. “We’re a co-founder of the project. DPDK is a good foundation for software. If you want a software appliance that competes with hardware — something that gives a boost — we believe it’s DPDK.”

DPDK consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a variety of CPU architectures. The open source DPDK project moved to the Linux Foundation in April.

LeBlanc said 6WIND got into the vRouter business about three years ago as an extension to its packet processing business. “We’ve been selling packet processing software for a decade,” she said. “We noticed that one of the most popular use cases was routing. We packaged the routing and made it its own appliance.”

As far as competition in the vRouter market, in addition to 6WIND, Juniper Networks and Cisco both sell vRouter software. There’s also the open source VyOS software, which is free to download but doesn’t come with any support.