Is Vyatta as fast, cheap and wonderful as it claims to be?

Vyatta says forget about thinking of it as just an open-source router. The company wants to do the whole networking enchilada. "Think of us not just as a pure routing play but also firewall, VPN, WAN load balancing," says Vyatta's Dave Roberts in this video interview with Network World's Jim Duffy at Interop.

Roberts claims that Vyatta's approach offers twice the performance at half the cost of a Cisco 2821 in "independent" tests and said that a report published in March showed that its wares were one-quarter of the price of a Cisco 7200 while outperforming the 7200 in forwarding and reconvergence for large routing tables.

However, it should be noted that while Roberts likes to tout these results as coming from "independent" tests, the one in March was actually commissioned by Vyatta (performed by the Tolly Group). When the vendor pays for the test, that's not exactly independent. But, even so, what Vyatta can't do, Roberts admits, is scale like high end Cisco gear.

He also talks about the difference in open source development where democracy rules (or at least counts). People can vote for their favorite features and vote against their least favorite. (Bandwidth Policing is, so far, the favorite whereas Frame Relay Traffic Shaping is far-and-away the least favorite, probably because people cutting edge enough to be using open source routing and voting for favorite features online have long since abandoned Frame Relay.)

Watch Robert's performance and weigh in. Has networking become a commodity resource where low-price rules? (7min, 58sec)

If you enjoy this video, you might also want to poke around through the 40-plus videos Network World filmed during Interop. Other notables for Cisco Subnet readers include.

UC: an amorphous blog
Jed Daniels, team educator on the UC iLabs team at Interop discusses the strange state of the UC industry. (8 min, 55 sec)

The evolution of deep packet inspection with Greg Kopchinski from Bivio Networks (6 min, 3 sec)

Netgear launches SMB network gear (8min, 32sec)

The legacy of DNS, 25 years later with the inventor of DNS, Paul Mockapetris (9 min, 30 sec)

Testing 802.11n: Ready for the enterprise? With independent tester David Newman (5 min, 1sec)

Managing the IP address explosion with Michael Hyatt (7min, 41sec)
 

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