The software has been available for some time, but a recent announcement made the project's products available to everyone.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 12, 2006]

ISPs are now accustomed to using open source software, but recently we've been hearing from vendors of open source hardware. We got an update recently from Opengear (see New Gear for Remote POP Monitoring). Now we're talking to San Mateo, Calif.-based Vyatta, a vendor of open source routers.

The company is reaching out to ISPs in anticipation of its appearance on the show floor at ISPCON.

"Our elevator pitch is that as Red Hat is to Sun Microsystems or Microsoft, so we are to Cisco, Nortel, and the other proprietary router vendors," says David Roberts, Vyatta vice president of strategy and marketing.

Vyatta launched earlier this year, and released its first product in July, but Roberts has been with the company for almost 18 months, dating back to when the company was in stealth mode. The company provides open source products and, just last week, also announced a bundle including hardware and software, with the hardware coming from Dell.

The idea, Roberts says, is to give customers what they want. "We're anticipating demand from folks who'd like a pre-built model. We want to meet the need for flexibility about how people consume our IP. It's free for technically sophisticated people. The next level will buy a subscription, if they have old hardware they can use. And for folks more accustomed to a networking appliance model, we'll sell them a box and they can uncrate and rack without dealing with CD ROMs or having to load software."

The company, Roberts says, is seeing software downloads from businesses of all sizes, from the smallest ISP and SOHO shop to the largest enterprises and carriers. Vyatta is still examining its customer demographic and is reaching out to all potential customers, including ISPs.

Roberts says the company has a good business case for ISPs. The pricing is right for companies of any size, and the devices can handle throughput up to 2 Gbps. "At the carrier level, we've seen interest in using our system as a CPE box, as a general purpose solution."

He says ISPs are also interested in the product because they understand that open source boxes are flexible.

The boxes
The company delivers open source routers, based on Linux. It's aiming at midrange routers, such as those from Cisco, Juniper, or Nortel. For example, it competes with Cisco products from the 1800 range up through the 7200 to 7500 range.

The open source development relies on a large number of already existing open source projects, many of them well known, like OpenSSH and Apache. In addition, the company is a sponsor of the eXtensible Open Router Project (XORP) and has a key member of the project on its board, Atanu Ghosh of UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).

The company adds value, Roberts feels, by combining the various open source projects and adding a familiar command line interface, obviating the need to restart daemons, for example.

Currently the project is on Dell's x86 boxes, but, Roberts says, "we're not wedded to an x86 architecture, or to software-based routing."

Before it makes any big changes, however, the company needs to add some features that people expect in the routers Vyatta cites as competition. The top three requested features, Roberts says, are VPN, QoS, and WAN optimization. "We're also seeing some demand for a branch office in a box, with Asterisk included."

He adds that Vyatta does not support legacy topologies like token ring and AppleTalk.

Nevertheless, Roberts feels the company already has a challenger for the midrange router market, which Vyatta estimates is worth $8 billion. And Vyatta can only get better.

Pricing and availability
Vyatta products are available now. The open source code is free. Subscriptions for support start at $500 per box per year, and new hardware starts at $1,800.

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