Vyatta 3500 network appliances
Vyatta just launched the Vyatta 3500 network appliances that cost-sensitive organizations are likely to find quite interesting. They are built upon the foundation of Vyatta's open source network virtualization and security technology and Intel's latest technology and are designed to go up against products offered by the big boys in this industry, Cisco and Juniper Networks.
Here's what Vyatta has to say about the 3500 family
Vyatta, the leader in open networking and network virtualization, today announced the Vyatta 3500 series of appliances. Delivering 20 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) bidirectional performance, these devices offer the routing, firewall and VPN functionality required for large datacenters and Service Provider borders. By combining Vyatta’s award-winning open networking software with Intel’s latest Nehalem architecture, Vyatta 3500 appliances deliver 10 Gbps networking capability at one-twentieth the price of proprietary alternatives, radically altering the price/performance landscape of the entire industry.
Intel recently used Vyatta software to benchmark the power of the Nehalem architecture for networking. The public paper (available here) states, “The revolutionary performance gains from Intel multi-core processors can be applied to data plane, control plane and service application workloads, producing impressive results.” The benchmark demonstrated clearly that “one Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series with quad-core technology can readily process 20 Gbps traffic and still have CPU capacity.” It also notes, “Solutions can scale by just adding processor cores and network adapters.”
Snapshot analysis
Poor Vyatta has had to put up with being the subject of several earlier posts including Vyatta Open Source Routing and Security Software and Vyatta - changing the world of routers, firewalls and VPNs because I think that their approach offers a number of advantages including an open software platform and an open hardware platform.This time, Vyatta has taken its software technology and deployed it as a family of networking appliances making the technology more attractive to those who would rather purchase a package rather than loading software onto one of their own industry standard systems.
Since Cisco has started offering its own computers, in partnership with EMC, VMware and Intel, other hardware suppliers would be well advised to consider a partnership with Vyatta as part of a competitive strategy.