A Spanish internet service provider (ISP) ran out of throughput on its legacy Cisco and MikroTik hardware routers. So it decided to refresh its network with 6WIND’s virtual routers (vRouters).

The service provider Minorisa de Sistemas Informáticos y de Gestión is in the process of adopting 6WIND’s vRouters as core routers for its network. One Minorisa site is complete, a second is currently being migrated, and the company’s third site is on the roadmap.

Minorisa will run 6WIND’s vRouter software on white box hardware. The network transition will also allow Minorisa to move from around 10G to a 40G upstream and downstream network. The vRouter includes open APIs for integration with third-party and open source SDN managers and orchestrators.

6WIND Solution Engineer Karim Mchirki said Minorisa’s main reason for switching from Cisco and MikroTik to 6WIND and white box hardware was the higher throughput, and “they also wanted to go to a full SDN service.”

Because it’s software, Minorisa could choose, in the future, to upgrade from a 40G license to a 100G license, for example.

6WIND began offering its vRouter in August 2017 for customers who owned Brocade’s vRouter and were left out in the cold after AT&T bought Brocade. AT&T chose to use the Brocade vRouter for its own purposes and it discontinued support of the product for other customers.

But apparently 6WIND’s vRouter business has grown. Minorisa was not a former Brocade customer. But when shopping for a vRouter it discovered 6WIND’s product.

Based on Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), 6WIND’s vRouter delivers performance up to 12 million packets per second (12 Mpps) per core* of IP Forwarding, 18 Gb/s per core of IPsec, up to 1 million routes and 100,000 IPsec tunnels. Performance scales with the numbers of cores and hardware advancements, allowing Minorisa to move from 40G to 100G without redesigning its network.

*This story has been corrected from 12 Mb/s to 12 Mpps.