Vyatta Aims Higher

With the release of Vyatta Community Edition 4 and the nascent channel program, Vyatta is ready to take on Cisco in the data center.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 23, 2008]

Belmont, Calif.-based open source router maker Vyatta has issued a flurry of press releases since the start of the year. The most significant news was the most recent: the release of its Community Edition 4. Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta, explains that there are two editions of the core software: the community edition and the subscription edition.

He says there's a new release of the community edition about every six months (subscribers get more timely updates). The open source community website is vyatta.org.

The new release focuses on scalability and performance as Vyatta takes off the shelf hardware to deliver 10 gigabit routing.

Open source advantage
Roberts says that proprietary competitors (such as, presumably, Cisco) could deliver the same price-performance that Vyatta does, but lack any incentive to do so. As Vyatta sells only the software, its products gain when hardware goes down in price.

"We have embraced the open standard of the x86 ecosystem. If you're proprietary, Moore's Law messes up your pricing. Vyatta is pleased with Moore's Law because it lowers prices."

So the press release that Roberts is most interested in is a study by the Tolley Group that claimed that Vyatta could deliver about 2.5 times the throughput at 1/4 the cost of a Cisco 7200. "At the last trade show we were at, we were handing out CDs showing how a $4,000 IBM 1 U system with $4,000 of Vyatta software could replace a Cisco 7200, which costs about $35,000 (depending on options).

So that's the sales message: it's both cheaper and better.

When Roberts mentions faster BGP convergence, we ask for an explanation of what that is. "When routes change, we can find the best route and get those propogatesd into the forwarding engine faster than Cisco. With routing tables this big, Cisco could take 30 seconds to a minute to calculate all the change, and Vyatta could take 12 seconds."

Speeds increase
As 10 gigabit gear hit the open market, Vyatta started working with higher end manufacturers. Of course, the company continues to work closely with Dell, offering a Vyatta Certified Dell appliance at the top of its hardware catalog.

Look farther down the list, into the rackmounts, and you'll see a rackmount chassis from Los Altos, Calif.-based Liquid Computing. That chassis was announced in February of this year. Roberts says it offers a high end backplane plus a provisioning system and more. With Vyatta to do the firewall, VPN, and routing, it can actually replace data center hardware, he says.

And when faster speeds, such as 100 gigabits, become commonplace in hardware, Vyatta's software will take advantage of that too, Roberts says.

For now, the company is reaching out with its sales message and is building a resale channel across North America and around the world. "The neat thing about open source," Roberts says, "is that people understand it and know they can get involved."

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