Tomorrow, open-source routing vendor Vyatta will announce its new networking appliance, the Vyatta 2502, upping the ante in its competition with Cisco.
According to the Vyatta announcement, its new 2502 network appliance takes advantage of hardware technology advances to deliver 2.4 GHz dual-core forwarding performance as well as large memory size. Pricing on the new appliance will start at $2,747.
The announcement continued that with more than 2GB of RAM, the Vyatta 2502 delivers eight times the standard memory offering of the Cisco 2800 and 3800 series ISR family. The Vyatta 2502 offers dual, redundant 250GB hard disk drives in a RAID-1 configuration, which deliver large amounts of storage for advanced features such as web caching, intrusion prevention, and anti-virus scanning.
 "If you’re in the market for a mid-range enterprise networking solution, you can’t beat the price/performance of the Vyatta 2500 appliances," said Kelly Herrell - CEO of Vyatta. |
"As the recession wreaks havoc on IT budgets during this holiday season, Vyatta is giving a gift to over-extended network managers everywhere -- all the network power and performance they need for an extraordinarily low price."
In a note to yours truly, Vyatta stated:
| "One of the interesting things about the open source software-based networking is the ability to capitalize on rapid improvements in x86 hardware. As hardware performance and cost improves, Vyatta has the ability to take advantage of that immediately and pass the improvements and savings on to customers. |
"This is apparent with the new product – the Vyatta 2502 – which has 2x memory, dual core processor, 5x storage - starting at only $400 more than its predecessor, the 2501 (which was launched only 4 months ago).
"x86 hardware has roughly doubled in performance and capacity every year, while price-per-oomph has fallen every year. That's a level of price/performance advancement that no proprietary hardware vendor can touch.
"It's been four years since Cisco launched the ISR family – and those products are still shipping on the same hardware platform."
Official response from Cisco regarding the Vyatta note above:
| "Brad, |
"As you know, Cisco has a healthy respect for all competitors and we take all competitors seriously. However, as a technology strategy our focus is very much on making customers and partners successful. It’s this customer focus that has helped us stay ahead of the competition.
"A recent example of this customer-partner focus was announced just a few weeks ago. Take a look at how Cisco and Verizon Business helped Colgate-Palmolive increase its productivity and reduce IT costs and how we continue to innovate on the Cisco ISR platform with new capabilities:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_111808e.html
"This consistent focus on meeting our customer needs and achieving the 5M ISR milestone of customer deployments are validation of our success."
Do you use open-source routing appliances in your network, if so, how are they working out?
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i love open-source software
i love open-source software and i use too many popular open-source technology (Linux Netfilter , Snort NIDS, Openswan , Netflow collectors , Syslog servers , .. ) alongside my cisco gears. but if you are a real, professional open-source user , you will know there are too many gaps that you can’t fill them only with open-source software. for example while the Snort NIDS is one of the best open-source tool in the security filed , but can you plug it to the SPAN port of your gigabit network ? do you know snort running on a server class hardware ( 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM + Intel Gigabit NIC that support NAPI) drop the 40% of traffic in promiscuous mode when the traffic rate increased to only 50Mbps ? did you know Snort only work with one CPU core, no matter how many core you have because it is not a multithread process? do you know if you want to use any Libpcap tool (Unix/Linux packet capture driver) you need NIC with ASIC or co-processor (like NIC offered by www.endace.com) (they say they are not using ASIC in their products because the mid-range products do not need it while the X86 processor do the job better). I welcomed every company that push the open source software to the enterprise , but I believed that you should use the right tools in the right place and don’t confused your users with false , obscure information. For example how much traffic it can handle when configured as Statefull Firewall and IPS ? why they changed the popular linux kernel firewalling userland config syntax and use some unusual and hard to learn syntax (even for open-source experienced users).check their website and see the demo ! look at the NAT/Firewall configuration demo on their website. While the platform is Linux , they are using the linux Netfilter (99% I am sure) as stateful Firewall and NAT service.but they use unfamiliar syntax for NAT/Firewall configuration. Whey not using the IPTABLES (netfilter userland config tool) ? there are too many open-source software package on the internet (as installation packages or Live-CD on http://sourceforge.net) that can do the job better. check their website and find something about how their IPS work , how much time signatures updated , how much traffic it can handled . if you installed a 10Gbps NIC card , is that means it can handle 10Gbps traffic (did they know about IRQ oversubscription on busy network)?
Something else : I am not a Cisco partner , reseller or employee .i am just a network security professional that believed you should the right tools in the right place. I run 4 Snort sensor on my WAN entry points (the server is a 4-core intel with 4GB RAM and Linux kernel optimized for packet captured , NAPI , MMAP supports, but still I have minor packet loss) and use a Cisco IPS-4260 in server farms. that means using the right tools in the right place.
thanks
Hmmm....
Abolfathi, you seem to be making two main points:
1. Open source can't do everything.
2. Vyatta uses different syntax than Linux.
Regarding point #1, you might be surprised that we agree with you. Open source can't do everything. But neither can closed source. Every tool has a range of applicability. If you try to use a tool outside the range of its applicability, it will suck. Thus, Vyatta not be the best solution for a gigabit IDS. If that's what you're looking for, you're probably better off using something else. On the other hand, a Cisco 3800 makes a lousy hammer; don't try to pound nails with it.
Regarding point #2, syntaxes are personal preferences. It sounds like you're a network administrator who is also a Linux guru and that you prefer to work with raw Linux. If that's true, then Vyatta is not for you. And to be honest, it wasn't designed for people you. Vyatta users and customers are often interested in Vyatta because it adopts a more "appliance-like" user interface that would be comfortable for a Cisco/Juniper user, without forcing that user to learn Linux. Obviously, Linux and Cisco/Juniper equipment use different interfaces, so you have to disappoint somebody. We deliberately chose to disappoint Linux users who already have a great system: Linux itself. In the process, we hope we ease the training requirements of network administrators coming from those other platform who will find Vyatta far more familiar than a Linux CLI. That said, Vyatta also allows admins who are skilled in Linux to execute Linux commands using the "FusionCLI" in our system.
-- Dave Roberts, Vyatta
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