Vyatta, a maker of open source routers, has unveiled a product for the small-to-midsize business market.
The Vyatta 514 is a networking appliance that combines the company's open source routing and security software with a small form factor hardware platform. The product features integrated routing, firewall and VPN capabilities to connect small businesses and branch offices to the Internet or private networks.
The Vyatta 514 appliance includes pre-installed software that offers Border Gateway Protocol, Open Shortest Path First and Routing Information Protocol routing protocols, integrated security features such as stateful firewall, network address translation, IPSec and Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol VPN, as well as VoIP QoS, high availability and WAN load balancing, Vyatta says. The appliance hardware includes four onboard 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports, and one PCI expansion slot to add network interfaces, including 10/100/1000 Ethernet, ADSL, and T-1/E-1.
With Linux-based open source routing software on x86 commodity processing hardware, Vyatta claims it can offer functionally equivalent routing at a fraction of the cost of leading manufacturers. The company recently disclosed results of a study that it claims shows a 10-fold increase in price/performance over a Cisco 7200 router.
The company also recently announced that its software can scale to support 10Gigabit Ethernet connections.