Do businesses necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars on network routers from giants such as Cisco? Vyatta, with the company tagline welcome to the dawn of open source networking, is challenging the idea with an open source network appliance for the small- and medium-sized (SMB) business market. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is a small appliance that uses the company's Linux-based applications. Pricing starts at $697, with products from Cisco and others costing thousands more, but the jury's out on whether businesses will trust the core of their hardware/software network infrastructure to open source.
