In a bit of David vs. Goliath, Vyatta this week claimed that it can give you 10 times the price/performance of a Cisco 7200 router, and added that its software can scale to 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Vyatta commissioned The Tolly Group to run some tests of its routing software on an IBM server. Tolly used a 2.66-GHz quad-core Intel-based IBM System X 3550 server and Vyatta software. At $7,952, the system cost much less than the $35,756 for the Cisco 7204-G2 and the $30,756 for the 7204-G1.

Tolly found that the Vyatta system supported a BGP route table size of 4.5 million routes, which was 1.5 times as much as the 7204-G2 and 3.2 times as much as the G1. Tolly acknowledged that this was a direct result of the memory that could be installed on the routers - the testing firm was able to put more memory on the IBM server and therefore get a larger route table.

Tolly also found that the Vyatta system was two to three times more responsive to network topology changes.

Tolly acknowledged that the Cisco 7204-G2 performed better than the other two devices when smaller packet sizes were involved, but the Vyatta system performed better when packets were larger than 512 bytes.

The full report can be found here. 

Meanwhile, Vyatta said its routing software, in conjunction with the IBM server mentioned above and a Neterion Xframe E 10 Gigabit Ethernet card, can achieve 10 Gigabit Ethernet. My colleague Jim Duffy has more on that here.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.