Vyatta Is Not A Viable Open Source Competitor To Cisco.

Thomas Ptacek | September 28th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized

1.

Alan Shimel responds to an InfoWorld brief on Vyatta, the XORP Open Source Router startup:

The answer is not to play the same old, same old game but cheaper. Introduce new features and technology into the mix. Linux does not compete with Windows because it is free or cheaper, it works better and offers things Windows doesn’t.

So, I agree with this. We wrote about Vyatta a couple months back, pointing out:

  • The IP forwarding battle is over switching, not routing; no router startup is going to change the world anymore.

  • The capex cost of the router is negligable compared to the opex cost of managing the connection; a $0 router could lose to Cisco today.

  • If you don’t have the equivalent of the Cisco ISR, you don’t have a competitive router; Vyatta doesnt.

  • Open source routing is old news. Why didn’t NextHop or IPinfusion win here?

2.

But here’s something InfoWorld quotes, and Alan lets slide:

We understand [Cisco] has an 80% market share and that routing protocols haven’t changed much since Methuselah,” Herrell said. “But we’re taking on the myth that routing requires specialized protocols by offering an open alternative.

Does anybody really think that lack of routing protocol innovation is stifling the industry? Most enterprises —- no, wait, virtually all enterprises —- barely touch the IOS defaults, or even break out OSPF areas. And that’s real enterprises. A majority of the SMB businesses Vyatta targets won’t even use routing protocols (note to Roland: static doesn’t count). There are three things about this argument that annoy me:

  1. Routing protocols aren’t in play in Vyatta’s game.

  2. There’s nothing decrepit about OSPF (ok, maybe BGP4 is a fair target, but 0% of SMBs are even in a position to use it).

  3. This isn’t even a good marketing spiel for Vyatta; what is a potential buyer supposed to take away from this, that Vyatta wants to use strange new protocols?

3.

Finally, just to be mean:

Vyatta OFR is targeted against Cisco routers like the 2821 and 3845, which cost about $4,000 and $13,000, respectively. In contrast, Vyatta OFR hardware plus one year of support comes in at “just under $2,000,” the company said.

The thing about having a 600 page product list is, you can always find a Cisco part that sounds similar to yours that will list at 14x yours. In reality, at “just under $2000”, Vyatta isn’t even competing with Cisco on price. $4000? Give me a break.

1 Comment so far

  • dre

    September 28th, 2006 2:02 pm

    when vyatta has the equivalent of hardware cef, then we can talk about them. actually, they are about 30 years behind cisco, so maybe we can just hold off this conversation until then. if xorp started messing around with opencores… then they might have something, but still not a cisco competitor.

    you should note that many/most enterprises do change the ios defaults… and way too many of them use way too many ospf areas (please note that multi-area ospf == suboptimal routing). plus, there have been many improvments to ospf over the past 15 years. by name they are isis and eigrp.

    most of the innovation in routing protocols today is with adhoc or mesh networks. these protocols are going to be very important for the mobility devices of the future. do a quick scan of the recent internet drafts and you’ll see tons of stuff about mobile networking. go into sony or nintendo’s research labs - both are hard at work building the mobile gaming devices we’ve all dreamed about since we were kids.

    if you want to see real innovation in networks check out the cuwin or roofnet projects. they are using atheros as dual radio with mesh protocols such as hsls and srcrr. maybe that’s why cisco is targeting the embedded consumer market so heavily as of late…

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