OStatic

Can open source technology bring cost savings and performance advantages even down at the core network infrastructure levels where players such as Cisco dwell? Vyatta, which offers both software and hardware aimed at the space, is pushing forward with the concept that it can. On the heels of its recent announcement of an open source router aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses--where Vyatta's router costs thousands less than comparable offerings from Cisco--the company has a new version 4 release of its Vyatta Community Edition network operating system. Previous editions have been downloaded 150,000 times by organizations in aerospace and defense, education, financial services, and government.

Version 4 of Vyatta's Community Edition open source operating system offers more scalability and expanded application support to its router/firewall/VPN feature set. Version 4 now scales from DSL to 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments, so enterprises and service providers can potentially save money deploying hardware running it instead of alternative proprietary hardware/software combinations such as Cisco's 7200 series.

The new version of Community Edition also extends out to some new applications. There is a VPN for remote access, QoS, role-based access control, and more. This particular aspect of Vyatta's strategy--focusing on one open source software image at the core of a network rather than mashing up numerous proprietary software solutions--seems promising.

It is, of course, an uphill climb for a small company to challenge the Cisco's of the world with open source software intended to sit at the heart of business network infrastructures. Business users will ask for top-notch support, won't tolerate incompatibilities, IT people in enterprises can often have two-fisted approaches to sticking with proprietary software, and more.

Nevertheless, Vyatta appears to make significant progress with each of its new releases, and gets good marks from its customers for support. In addition, it's not true that open source software can't ever reliably be scaled for big enterprises, or be properly supported at the enterprise level. Just look at how good a job Red Hat and Novell do with their Linux distributions for enterprises. Or, consider the fact that Yahoo runs its entire site on FreeBSD. Vyatta remains interesting to follow.

Do you think more open source software belongs in core enterprise networking infrastructures?

• Cisco
• linux
• Vyatta