Vyatta (meaning ‘open’ in ancient Sanskrit), which took the networking world by storm through its introduction of the first commercially supported, open-source router and firewall solution a few years ago, is back in the news once again, this time with its robust and innovative network operating system, Vyatta Community Edition 4 (VC4).

Vyatta, the open source networking company, had announced to the media that they had released Vyatta Community Edition 4 (VC4), the latest version of its already popular, open source based network operating system to users. Over most currently available proprietary network solutions, the VC4 offers significant scalability improvements and expanded application support to its router/firewall/VPN feature set and achieves a 10X price/performance advantage. Pricing has one of the major advantages of Vyatta, which places it as a viable open-source alternative to solutions from majors like Cisco/Juniper. According to Vyatta sources, VC4 now scales from DSL to 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments, offering big and small enterprises and service providers with high-performance networks a robust, open alternative to expensive proprietary network systems. Further, VC4 incorporates new routing technology for enhanced performance and leverages the constant improvement in open-source components and the rapid advances within the x86 ecosystem for a substantial price over performance advantage. A recent Tolly Group analysis on the same showed that Vyatta achieved 2-3 times higher performance in internet routing against a cost saving of over 75% against the performance of Cisco’s 7200 product family. This adds up to 10X price/performance, as the company claims. Similarly, VC4 delivers high-performance 10 Gbps networking for as cost as less as $6,000 against $50,000+ for most competing proprietary products.

Apart from these, the Vyatta Community Edition 4 is designed to accommodate virtually any number of future applications and extensions to existing ones.

Also, much to the relief of managers of smaller networks using DSL or cable connections, VC4 provides support for PPPoE and dynamic interface IP addresses, and WAN load balancing. At the launch of the new product, Vyatta CEO quipped «Customers can now deploy and manage a single network OS, instead of juggling dozens of incompatible versions chasing after different product requirements. Along with a 10X price/performance advantage, the management advantages bring a radically better TCO to customers who embrace open networking. We’re thrilled with Vyatta’s adoption and community development to date, and are looking forward to delivering more advancements at a modern pace of innovation.» Vyatta’s Community Edition software has been downloaded over 150,000 times already by organizations in aerospace and defense, financial services, education, government, technology etc, and the number is increasing by the day. Hopefully, the new Community Edition version VC4 also draws similar interest from industries across all spectrums. Vyatta’s Community Edition 3, the predecessor to VC4, was launched in November 07. Vyatta’s other services include online training (called Vyatta University), worldwide technical support to the buyers of its products, and professional consulting services. Readers could find more about Vyatta products and services from www.vyatta.com. More web hosting review available at www.ixwebhostingreview.org