At the same time, the company is phasing out dedicated appliances designed primarily for small and medium-sized enterprises and branch offices. A growing number of those types of customers now choose to run Vyatta software on the same servers that run their applications, CEO Kelly Herrell said. Vyatta expects to sell its last appliances around the middle of this year.

Vyatta sells software that performs higher-level network functions such as routing and security, which traditionally have been carried out by dedicated equipment. The Vyatta vPlane technology that the company announced on Tuesday is designed to take advantage of servers based on powerful, multicore x86 architectures such as Intel's Sandy Bridge, which offer as many as 24 cores per CPU. Doing so increases packet throughput and makes it easier to scale out routing performance to handle growing traffic loads, Herrell said.

With vPlane, Vyatta will separate the software for its control plane, which makes traffic-handling decisions, and for its forwarding plane, which carries them out. In Vyatta's current software, those appear as a single workload and have to run on the same core. Once they are separated, they'll be able to run on separate cores, and enterprises will be able to implement the forwarding software on as many cores as they need to scale out performance, Herrell said. The vPlane technology is being tested now.

The new forwarding plane's performance is more than 10 times higher on each core it runs on, so with additional cores, it can boost Vyatta's speed even more. On an Intel Westmere-class system, Vyatta with vPlane can deliver more than 8 million packets per second per core. Across a single 1U rack server based on Westmere, the new technology can handle 35 million packets per second, the company claims.

Vyatta doesn't replace the Layer 2 switches that link one server or rack to another with simple packet forwarding, but the intelligent routing decisions it makes can reduce unnecessary trips from one server to another, according to Herrell. That function is growing more valuable as enterprises run more applications on virtual machines spread across many hardware servers, he said. Traffic among those VMs may not have to leave the immediate server or rack, where Vyatta is running alongside other applications.