Open source routers come to an Internet exchange near us

Vyatta's open source routers are bubbling away, and have a new deployment, not far away as the packet flies: in Telecity, Amsterdam.

I think open source is a good bet for router software. It doesn't suffer the difficulties of more visible software such as desktop operating systems (user interfaces take lots of hands and eyes to make them, and lots of effort to keep them consistent). It just needs to work well, and have a responsive support company for fixing problems.

The leader in the field - correct me if I'm wrong - seems to be Vyatta. The company is doing all the right things marketing-wise, including selling open source as a recession-buster with a discount offer, going head to head with the competition, and issuing test results that show it beating Cisco,

The company is also gathering good case studies. For instance, Ben King of network designers, Net That Works, has just installed two routers at Telecity in Amsterdam, for IT services and hosting company Danego.

The installation includes a BGP Endpoint for each of Danego's two upstream providers, external firewalling, and internal subnetting and routing, done in a ’router on a stick’ style using VLANs. The whole thing is clustered for failover so it's resilient to failures of switches and routers.

Those routers? It's just Vyatta software running on general purpose Dell hardware provided by the client. King's only problem was when the customer gave him untried new Dell hardware: "Typically we deploy Vyatta on Dell R200s (what were 860s), Danego however managed to get a stunning deal out Dell on 2950s."

Fine, only the new Dells use a different chipset for their RAID controller, and Vyatta didn't like it. It's a known bug, though and Vyatta sent a new version of the software, pronto, when King phoned them. "This is why we love Vyatta," he says.

"Although this is not anything like the biggest Vyatta deployment we have done, I like it because it demonstrates how using HP and Vyatta you can very effectively deliver a relatively complex redundent solution for a fraction of the equivalent Cisco price."

There are pictures here.