Vyatta Announces Gains in Service Provider Market

Open source routers have enabled service providers to better tailor their services to their customers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 16, 2007]

When we last spoke to Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing for Belmont, Calif.-based open source router developer Vyatta one year ago, the company was brand new to market.

Today, the company says its ready to show ISPCON attendees what open source hardware can do for service providers, whether they run data centers, broadband networks, or business consultancies.

Small ISPs offer big services
One target Vyatta is aiming at is Cisco and Juniper routers in smaller ISPs. "We found," says Roberts, "that outside of the large tier 1 ISPs, a lot of people are looking for cost effective high performance solutions. Smaller ISPs need large routing tables but don't necessarily need the terabit forwarding performance, and with Juniper and Cisco, they are forced to buy equipment that can do both."

"In contrast, Vyatta, which is based on standard hardware, ISPs can save money. If you were here sitting across the table from me [but we're on the phone], I'd show you two Ethernet interfaces, one from Cisco and one standard PCI adapter card. The one from Cisco costs over $1,000 and the standard one costs $20. If you don't need ASIC-based forwarding, you'll find that Vyatta makes a ton of sense."

Big data centers need to save money
At the other end of the SP spectrum, large data centers owned by managed service providers contain far too much specialized hardware in the form of firewalls, load balancers, and similar appliances. Roberts says that hosting providers can take a Vyatta box, running Debian Linux, and put VMWare or Xen on it. Then they can offer multiple firewalls with one piece of hardware, and, if necessary, can repurpose that hardware.

"There's no need to pre-plan," says Roberts. "You can convert a firewall box to a server. If you need power supplies, you can just grab a new one. This doesn't just offer economies of scale; users get economies on upgrades too!"

Roberts is the first to admit that open source is not free, starting with the support contract every ISP should have. Costs are also evident in the talent needed to run the infrastructure. But when you can do so much with it, it pays to staff the infrastructure.

Customer announcements
The core of Vyatta's announcement today is two customer wins. Cornwall, U.K.-based OpenTelecom is claiming throughput comparable to a similar Cisco deployment for one-eighth the cost. The press release adds that OpenTelecom has had no downtime since installing Vyatta in November, 2006.

The press release says that the other customer announced today, Maryland-based BinFone, switched to Vyatta after the failure of a Cisco system. It quotes Justin Newman, the president of BinFone, as saying, "Cisco is incredibly difficult to buy, and comes with unfavorable licensing and poor support. I can put Vyatta on commodity hardware, at a huge cost advantage, and Vyatta support has been excellent."

And so open source moves into areas that seemed impervious to it. That's not to say that Cisco has lost. On the contrary, this contest has just begun.

— End