Vyatta pits new appliances against Cisco ISR

06.04.2011
Open source networking player Vyatta this week refreshed its mid-range routing and appliances with three new models aimed at small to mid-sized enterprises and branch offices.

The Vyatta 2600, 1600 and 600 series network appliances are based on multi-core x86 Intel processors running Vyatta's Network OS software. Vyatta claims the new appliances offer more than three times the performance of Cisco's Integrated Services Generation 2 (ISR G2). For example, by Vyatta's calculations, the 2600 moves 600,000 more packets per second than the ISR 3925.

Vyatta's been at the "beating on for some time. Its message usually resonates in smaller enterprises where a Cisco installation might bust the IT budget.

VYATTA SPEAKS:

The company's strategy hinges on a software-based alternative to proprietary networking products where software and hardware are tightly coupled. It treats Layer 3 switching and routing as a platform-independent application so it can be inexpensively offered as software, virtual machines and x86 based appliances for physical network edge, virtual data center and environments.

Such a strategy has helped Vyatta gain significant traction in cloud and environments . Once only 10% of Vyatta's business, cloud and virtualization now account for 40% of the company's sales, says Tom McCafferty, Vyatta vice president of marketing.