Do businesses necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars on network routers from giants such as Cisco? Vyatta, which has a company tagline of "Welcome to the dawn of open source networking," is challenging the idea with a new open source network appliance aimed at the small- and medium-sized (SMB) business market. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is a small form factor appliance that uses the company's Linux-based applications. Pricing starts at $697, with comparable products from providers such as Cisco costing thousands more, but the jury's out on whether businesses will trust the core of their hardware/software network infrastructure to open source.
The Vyatta 514 appliance has all security and routing software pre-installed, and is based on standard routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, and RIP). It's integrated security features include a stateful firewall, NAT, IPSec and PPTP VPN. It also incorporates VoIP QoS, WAN load balancing, and more. The device is small, but it has four onboard 10/100-Mbps Ethernet ports, plus a PCI expansion slot for connecting ADSL, T1/E1, etc. You can view several video demos showing how Vyatta's open source software works.
Vyatta has recently been in the news for publicizing a third-party test that it commissioned showing that its routers outperformed Cisco 7200 Series routers in performance tests. The tests were based on the BGP Internet routing protocol and showed a 2x to 3x performance boost over Cisco's routers. However, those tests involved Vyatta's software running on an IBM System X 3550 server for a total cost of $7,592. Still, Cisco's comparable routing solutions go for over $30,000.
Vyatta's business model centers on subscription-based support, and while the company remains relatively small, that may be a good strategy. If your business router goes down, you don't want to listen to music on hold. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether businesses will deem core hardware/software network processes such as routing to open source. The company is definitely aiming high. In other news, it recently announced that its open source solutions scale to 10 Gigabit environments.
Do you think small businesses will opt in?
Comments
Add CommentBy on Mar. 27, 2008
Hardware, unlike software is much more difficult sell, IMHO. For software, you can jump in and modify things as required and code (preferably well written. And documented!) is all you need to get going. For hardware, on the other hand, you need to have support available, and would be less likely to rely on any piece just because it is open source. You cannot jump in as easily in the physical world as you can in the virtual world and begin to hack away.
Tough.
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