Vyatta Reflects on Six Years of Industry Firsts

When Vyatta (News - Alert)  – a company that prides itself on offering next generation on demand routing and security – first introduced itself to the market six years ago, it billed itself as a company offering the industry’s first and only platform-independent network operating system, predominantly for small scale ISPs.

But over the last two years, Vyatta has quickly seen its use case expand from those ISPs seeking branch office connectivity to some of the largest enterprises asking for multi-tenant cloud capabilities, something that might not be all that surprising given the increasing ubiquity of cloud. And that multi-tenant support has certainly caught the attention of the Fortune 500s, in addition the mom and pop stores.

“As the cloud and virtualization have become more common and the power of the platform has grown, we have seen use cases around multi-tenant cloud,” Scott Sneddon, director of cloud solutions for Vyatta, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East in New York last week. “That’s been the biggest uptake of the platform in the last two years.”

“We are about software based networking on commodity hardware – leveraging the advancements of the chipsets to provide scalable networking services in a true multi-tenant environment,” he added.

Today, Vyatta is known for its Vyatta On Demand Networking platform which supports next gen IT architectures and is characterized as being agile with regards to the applications it supports. According to company officials, Vyatta pioneered the decoupling of routing and security software from proprietary hardware, creating the first and only platform-independent network operating system, Vyatta Network OS.

With Vyatta Network OS, system architects can seamlessly secure and connect virtual, cloud or physical infrastructures while delivering the same elasticity, mobility, auto-provisioning and utility licensing benefits of the applications they support.

“The customer is everybody,” Sneddon said. “It’s anybody that is doing a virtualized deployment and needs to take advantage of the multi-tenant aspects. Whether company is in a public cloud or in private cloud, you still have multi-tenant concerns.”

“Traditional methods of doing security in the virtual layer don’t scale to that granular environment you get to in a truly optimized virtual environment,” he added. “By providing a lot of the same technology you get on the physical layer. We can provide really granular controls of security and segmentation to let service providers provider granular security controls as close to the endpoint as possible.” 

While at Cloud Expo, the word at the Vyatta booth was not just on its multi-tenant cloud capabilities but also on its recent announcement of Vyatta vPlane technology, a highly scalable forwarding plane for next-generation enterprise and cloud network designs. Delivering a combination of extraordinary speed and flexible deployment models, Vyatta vPlane’s fast-path architecture is poised to radically improve the cost and capabilities of networks for virtualized datacenters, according to company officials.

According to Sneddon, some of the chief benefits of Vyatta vPlane are that it is capable of delivering more than eight million packets per second per core, it demonstrates more than a 10 times improvement over Vyatta without vPlane, and since it scales linearly with the addition of cores, an entire Westmere system can deliver 35 million packets per second in only a single rack-unit of data center space.

With its multi-tenant cloud support and Vyatta vPlane platform, Vyatta is certainly taking great strides in remaining competitive in the marketplace. But for Vyatta, there is a lot more that makes the company so special.

“When we talk about virtual deployments and security issues, most of the other players are focused on VMware based security solutions, but the way we run a packaged appliance we are hypervisor agnostic; we can run in any virtual appliance,” Sneddon said. “Moreover, most of the other people playing in this space are only focused on security, but we bring a full routing feature set to the table.”

So what’s next for Vyatta?

“We see excitement around software networking,” Sneddon said. “All of these conversations are the right conversations to have. Let’s figure out a way to make the network more dynamic. Let’s figure out how to make everything interact the right way. The future of Vyatta is enabling that truly elastic cloud.”