Vyatta vPlane adds software defined networking

Vyatta is joining the ranks of suppliers offering tool designed  to support software defined networks. The company is calling this new capability "vPlane™."  vPlane is a clever routing plane that operates at layer 3 and separates a good deal of the network virtualization from the underlying network controller. The result is the combination of sophisticated network virtualization with vastly improved overall performance. The company is claiming that vPlane will allow its products  to deliver an order of magnitude faster forwarding performance.

Why should you care?

Most suppliers of network routing and network virtualization technology offer their software technology only as part of a special-purpose, purpose-built network routing appliance. Quite often, these are based upon the supplier's own microprocessor. The performance and overall pricing may not have kept pace with that offered by today's X86 processors. The result is greater costs combined with less performance.

Vyatta saw an opportunity to deliver the routing and network virtualization technology as a software appliance that could be executed on just about any off-the-shelf X86 system from just about any supplier. The result of this move was organizations received better routing and network virtualization capabilities at a lower overall cost. Furthermore, since this software appliance can be encapsulated into a virtual machine and run on the same physical hosts as other functions, network routing and virtualization can be monitored and orchestrated with other workloads.

As Yvatta rolls this technology out, it would be worth seeing a demonstration.