Networking’s Software Era

“A mind that is stretched to a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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There has been a flurry of news out of Vyatta, and a lot more is coming.  Here’s a quick post to put it all in context; there’s a common theme in it all, and it’s been quite shocking to the industry at large.

To start, consider 20 years of networking status quo.  After decades of doing things one way, the argument we heard was “things will never change.”

Now look at the summary of news over just the past two months: The world’s dominant chip vendor is promoting an awesome benchmark using Vyatta, large networking vendors are partnering with us, a huge telecom is preparing a massive Vyatta rollout, Gartner Group calls out the huge strategic advantages for those who embrace virtualized networking, and clouds are adopting Vyatta virtualized.

Meta-summary: The era of software-based networking is here.

Here’s how this is changing the landscape, and what you will keep seeing:

1.   Edge Consolidation
Vendors who have carved out best-of-breed positions for a specific type of network workload will integrate Vyatta into their offering.  Start saying goodbye to single-function devices.

2.  Managed Services
SaaS / PaaS type of models get a new type of network-based enablement.   Networking inherits the dynamicism and economics that computing enjoys.

3.  Networking as Utility
Clouds will deliver highly granular, utilization-based pricing for networking and security.  Utility models are no longer limited to compute and storage.

4.  Datacenter Efficiency
Power, space and cooling improve as networking gets drawn into server farms.  Server utilization is boosted as physical network limitations disappear.

Software-based networking enables all of the above via two fundamental advantages. First, it’s adaptable; no other method gives you hardware independence and architectural freedom.  Old proprietary boxes are boat anchors by comparison.  And second, it allows for innovative pricing models to fit the new economic requirements of services-based IT strategies like cloud.  In the new world IT costs need to be synchronized with the revenue it creates; but how can any form of metered pricing actually work if the upfront costs are ridiculously high, which is what the old way requires?  Simply, it can’t.

So keep watching Vyatta.  You’ll see all of the above come out into the sunlight as our customers and partners leverage the era of software-based networking.

Global Telecom Goes Virtual With Vyatta

“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.”
– Khalil Gibran
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2010 will mark the year network virtualization took off in a big way, and the largest use case in the world will be based on Vyatta:  Tens of thousands of virtual machines powering a telecom-class network offering.

We can’t mention yet who the telecom is, since the offering is theirs to launch.  But it’s one of the biggest in the world, with the technical foresight to realize that tremendous strategic advantage was theirs for the taking if they embraced the flexibility that open networking software allows.  In the coming months the world will see an ingenious offering that is simply not possible using closed, proprietary systems.

Two technology breakthroughs made it possible:
1.  A highly-capable open networking OS (Vyatta).
2.  Virtual machines for networking applications (Vyatta and others).

Recently the telecom and Vyatta briefed some key industry analysts under NDA.  What was fascinating is their reactions.  Joe Skorupa from Gartner said, “Service providers that are able to leverage advances in virtualization and networking are in a unique position to bring to market the next-generation of premises-based equipment and services for Enterprise branch offices. This technology will simplify the management and deployment of edge devices and services and fundamentally alter the economics of managed service delivery,” Others had similar reactions.  Think of what this portends:  Analysts are acknowledging the clear existence of a powerful trend that is close to breaking free.  All the world needs is to see one huge use case, and realize how powerful this technology strategy is in terms of driving business differentiation and efficiency.  The shock wave that’s about to be set off — driven by virtualization — will affect the networking industry with the same kind of impact with which it hit the computing industry.

Think of it:  Networking racks previously full of different devices now shrinking down to a single server with CPU power to spare. What’s the savings in CapEx and OpEx you can gain from eliminating entire classes of devices?  Space and power savings?

Imagine every branch office in your company being served by the same software template of VMs.  The only difference between offices is how big of a server is needed based on usage.  Put a 4-core server in the Dubuque office and an 8-core server in the Seattle office.  Both offices run the exact same networking software.

And think about cloud and datacenters… multi-tiered application structures requiring networking and security between them all.  Spin up a Vyatta VM here to route the traffic between apps on different servers, a VM there to firewall off the HR database, yet another as the VPN concentrator for everyone’s remote access.  Consider the sheer economic benefits of being able to snapshot a software template from one datacenter and clone it at another another for disaster recovery… without moving around or duplicating specialized hardware devices.

Vyatta is already used virtualized in branch offices, datacenters, and both public and private clouds.  The early adopters are gaining the advantage, and 2010 will be their showcase year. So perhaps you’ll pardon me while I boogaloo… but this is getting FUN

See press release >>

Intel Takes Vyatta to 10Gig

“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is, ‘Never get involved a land war in Asia.’”
- Vizzini, “The Princess Bride”
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Intel just published a very exciting Router benchmark using Vyatta that will prove to have historical ramifications.  It’s worth stepping back for a moment to put it in the proper context.

By now we all know that open-source is the most wildly disruptive force to ever hit software, and that Linux holds the highest credit for starting it all.  But in the jolting earthquakes and aftershocks of this adoption, it’s easy to forget the single greatest reason why Linux achieved such broad initial adoption.

It was the hardware.

Before Linux, Unix was only available on vendor-specific hardware.  Sun’s offering was Solaris on their SPARC-based servers, IBM offered AIX on their PowerPC-based servers, HP gave you HP-UX on their PA-RISC-based servers, etc.  Everywhere you looked, Unix was trapped in proprietary hardware.

Then along came Linux which gave the world Unix functionality — on the x86 architecture. This had two initial benefits:
1.   A radically lower hardware cost model
2.  A phenomenal new price/performance curve to ride.

Almost overnight Linux/x86 systems took out departmental installations.  As Intel continued its inexorable drive, Linux quickly moved into the datacenter.  A lot of people think Linux hurt Microsoft the most; the truth is, Linux cleaned out the Unix server market like Michael Moore at a free buffet.  And superior price/performance delivered by x86 servers was the true enabler.  As a wise old man once told me, “When it comes to standards-based platforms, never bet against the world’s largest semiconductor company.”

That’s the way it all went down.  And now, repeating history, Intel has published an earth-shattering benchmark using Vyatta on a single-CPU Nehalem server.  The result?  Line-rate 20-Gigabit bi-directional networking performance from a class of servers widely available from Dell, HP, IBM etc — servers that cost less than $5,000. This is precisely the hardware dynamic that powered the adoption of Linux.

So why don’t the existing networking vendors jump on board?  It’s simple:  It would destroy their business as they know it — they make money by offering small, slow boxes and upselling the customer into large, expensive boxes.  That’s why 10-Gigabit in the proprietary network vendor model is a $100,000 expense proposition.

Even the equity researchers are starting to understand just how powerful this open-source / x86 dynamic is in networking.  Wells Fargo Securities’ Equity Research Department recently wrote, “Based on independent tests, Vyatta software consistently meets or exceeds comparable closed-source routers in performance and throughput, typically at a much lower cost-basis (due to economic advantages of open source and commodity hardware).”

That’s exactly the kind of thing penned by analysts about Linux/x86 circa 2000.   Stay tuned… the revolution is upon us.

The Open-Source Business: What’s Tomorrow’s Dominance Worth Today?

“Futureshock:  The dizzying disorientation that accompanies the premature arrival of the future.”
- Alvin Toffler
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It took a long time for the concept of open-source to build to such a broad awareness that the mainstream media would write about it.  But it’s happening more than ever, and today the NY Times published an interesting piece about open-source business models and the strategic value of the entities and their respective technologies.

The author, Ashlee Vance, is a long-time and respected reporter in the technology industry.  Two of his key observations come together to create a puzzling effect:  First, that an open-source company’s revenues are a small fraction of their software downloads, and second, that the market value of the entities is tremendously outsized compared to their revenues.  He’s right on both fronts.  What’s not obvious is why these things are true.

A large handful of major open-source companies have been acquired for anywhere from 20 to 500 times their trailing revenues — astronomically high compared to other acquisition price ranges.  Here’s the key:  Not one major open-source acquisition has ever been initiated by the proprietary incumbent. Instead they were acquired by a company in an adjacency (e.g., Xen by Citrix, SpringSource by VMWare, MySQL by Sun, JBoss by Red Hat, etc.)

This is the dynamic caused by the constant shifting of technology markets:  Stand still and other vendors will morph around you, surrounding your offering and reducing your industry power.  Aggressive acquiring companies push this envelope, crafting strategies that are missing a key component – one that is unfortunately the property of another proprietary software company.  They covet that missing piece, so they choose to acquire the open-source inheritor of the space — and in the process, pay a large strategic premium.  It’s that simple.  (The same kind of “inheritor’s premium” is calculated in the public markets:  Red Hat’s P/E ratio is 60, while Microsoft and Oracle are at 19.)

So yes, the multiples are tremendous.  Meanwhile the open-source software is flowing like water around the world.  What gives?  It’s the combination of forward-looking investors and brutally efficient markets.  Under the right conditions, open-source will eventually dominate a category because it is the most economically efficient software model in the world. And smart investors (and acquirers) know that.

So what are the key conditions for open-source hegemony?

• Attacking very large markets, not niche ones.
• The average customer’s technical requirements are over-satisfied by the incumbent.
• Standards are broad enough to reduce vendor pricing power and induce commoditization.

With the proper business model, an open-source vendor can exploit these conditions to make their software “go viral.” The vendor wants their software to be ubiquitous so that users get comfortable with it, test it in labs, and begin to fold it into their longer-term IT strategies.  The primary goal is a worldwide user community.  What capitalists often miss is that every free download is not a lost sale; it’s an advertisement on steroids, a deeply powerful method of engaging a sales prospect.  And it was free of marketing cost.

Downloads are a future indicator of sales trending.  If the numbers are high, smart investors recognize this as a preamble to long-term growth.  But there will always be free users too, and cagey acquirers consider the competitive benefit of denying their competitor a sale for any reason.  If you can’t leave an impression, leave a mark.

But in the beginning the open-source vendor must grow their own sales.  This is dependent upon the buying patterns of the industry it’s attacking.  Valuable areas like expensive proprietary infrastructure have long replacement cycles.  So it’s no surprise that Red Hat has the largest open-source revenues:  they began inheriting the Unix market fourteen years ago.

The open-source business model works.  It’s just measured very, very differently.  And by the way:  Vyatta is now at half a million downloads in only three years

Cloud and Vyatta: A Perfect Fit

“People don’t buy drills, they buy the holes they make. “
- Ted Levitt, Harvard Professor of Marketing, circa 1960
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In all things, the value is what is enabled; the physical mechanism is just the means to an end.

In networking, it’s easy to forget this.  For decades we defined a network by the proprietary boxes used to create it.  What we wanted — routing and security — we acquired by deploying physical mechanisms.

Cloud computing jolts us awake from this pattern. In the pursuit of a radically new IT architecture customers focus on the functions they need, not how it is physically employed.  This results-oriented focus frees us from the mental constraints of the past and changes the way we think about how we acquire and deploy solutions to achieve our goals.  It also explains why Vyatta has been pulled into cloud infrastructures around the world.

At the base level, a cloud environment needs to be dynamically enabled, scalable, secure, and platform-neutral.  News Flash: Vyatta is the only networking software solution in the world that can satisfy these goals.  A few examples:

1. Dynamism: Cloud environments change quickly; new customers are added, new apps launched, new policies required.  A cloud must respond at a moment’s notice, and software is the best way to do this.  Need a new firewall?  Spin up a new Vyatta image.  Change a topology without moving boxes and cables?  Just move around Vyatta virtual machines.

2. Scalability: This, of course, can mean many things.  “Scale-up” a VPN aggregator to many thousands of tunnels?  Use multiple Vyatta virtual machines on the same server.  “Scale-out” firewalls across your application base?  Just add more Vyatta images as needed.  “Scale-in” your physical inventory?  Eliminate the need to depot proprietary devices, and use Vyatta on the same server infrastructure that you use everywhere else.

3.  Security: This is huge in the cloud environment.  Applications are accessed over a WAN, which means VPNs are a new standard requirement — they’re needed inside the cloud in a variety of topologies, and as a “secure modem” on the user’s premise… both are use cases for Vyatta.  Need LAN segregation inside the cloud?  Use Vyatta for VLANs.  Doing credit-card transactions from the cloud?  PCI compliance is easily satisfied with Vyatta firewalls in the cloud.

4.  Platform-Neutrality: To maximize cloud economics, customers need solutions that run on a variety of open hardware, and on a variety of virtualization platforms.  Vyatta does both… today.  Servers from Dell, HP, IBM, Supermicro, etc?  Vyatta runs on all of them.  Virtualized on VMWare, XenServer, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V?  Again, Vyatta today.

In case you’re wondering if the above is all theory, it’s not.  Vyatta has customers today doing everything listed above. And some of the most interesting use cases haven’t been publicized yet.

Look beyond Vyatta’s open-source heritage and what you will find is an extraordinary amount of value that has been unlocked by virtue of industry standards, open architectures… and software-based networking.  Some say our head is in the clouds. On that, it appears, we violently agree.

Scaling Networks the x86 Way: Vyatta/Intel vs Cisco

“At Intel, Moore’s Law is alive and thriving.”
– Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, Sept 22, 2009
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Vyatta is the only networking vendor whose wagon is hitched to the x86 ecosystem.  And that explains a lot about Vyatta adoption:  Our hardware R&D dwarfs Cisco’s.

It’s an easy proof.  Start with the fact that Intel and Cisco are roughly the same size (~$35B annual sales), and their R&D budgets are similar.  Here’s the 2008 data:
Intel R&D:  $5.7B          Cisco R&D:  $5.2B

Intel focuses theirs directly on improving price/performance of x86 and related components, while Cisco spreads theirs across a massively wide set of products.  So say Cisco actually spends 10% of their R&D on their hardware for routing and security, and you get this focused investment annually:
Intel:  $5.7B                     Cisco: $0.5B

That’s an 11X difference right there. Now factor in the pace of direct competition:  AMD is always pushing Intel, forcing them to go as fast as possible.  In fact AMD spent $1.9B last year in R&D doing just that.  Added in, we have:
Intel & AMD:  $7.6B      Cisco:  $0.5B

That brings us up to 15X R&D difference, in favor of x86. And we haven’t even discussed the massive R&D in the ecosystem surrounding x86 such as memory, LAN/WAN cards, & backplanes.  And let’s not forget the server vendors, spending R&D to productize and optimize x86-based systems;  HP, IBM and Dell take in nearly $300B a year collectively.  They’re absolutely investing R&D to make their servers competitive.

So proclaiming a 20X advantage in R&D for x86 infrastructure is an easy argument.  (In fact, it’s probably conservative.)  That means that over the past five years x86 infrastructure received 100 times more R&D than Cisco invested on their CPU-based hardware. Vyatta customers understand this… and love us for it.

The compounding effect of R&D supremacy is obvious. Two and a half years ago Vyatta published a benchmark that pitted a Dell server against Cisco’s lowest-priced GigE router – and clobbered it, with a 4X better price/performance.  But while x86 vendors kept pressing forward, Cisco STILL sells the same box today! Or how about this one:  One and a half years ago Vyatta published another benchmark, this time using a $3K IBM quad-core machine against a $35K Cisco box.  Again, x86-based hardware beat the proprietary gear like a rented mule.

And now there’s even more to love.  Intel recently shattered records again with their latest Nehalem offering — and Vyatta runs beautifully on it.  The next benchmarks are lining up:  This time it will be in the 10Gig arena, and the results are going to flatten Cisco.  Dell will sell you a Nehalem server today for $2K, and a dual-port 10Gig card for another $2K.  So customers can spend $4K for 10Gig hardware in the Intel world… or they can go to Cisco and spend $60K for the base system and another $20K for a single-port 10Gig card.

The bottom line: x86 hardware keeps moving up the Cisco food chain, and Vyatta lets customers take advantage of these kind of price/performance advantages:

• 2007:  4X ($800 vs $3,300)
• 2008:  12X ($2,900 vs $35,000)
• 2009:  20X ($4,000 vs $80,000)

That’s scaling, the x86 way.  It’s clear:  Vyatta customers are on the smart side of the equation.

If You Can’t Laugh At Yourself…

“Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense.  This makes you look smart.”
– Dilbert creator Scott Adams
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It was inevitable:  Sometime, somewhere, there would come into being a snarky list of things your networking salesperson knew in their heads but would never say out loud. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that your loyal servants at Vyatta would be the ones to do it.

It’s not like the Big Proprietary Networking Vendors couldn’t have seen the jokes coming.  After all, they’re the ones smart enough to figure out how to get customers to pay astronomical premiums for underpowered gear, or to engage in forklift hardware upgrades for the most asinine of reasons.

Any vendor pulling that much wool would have to know that they would get punk’d sooner or later.

After all, their gross margins DWARF the margins of other world-class IT companies.  Check out the earnings statements of a Big Proprietary Networking Vendor (yes, look at more than just one of them).  They’re doing nearly 70% of gross margin!  Yet world-class HP is doing 25%, and Dell is at 19%.  How in the name of Gates do the networking guys get away with it?  Do they have a picture of each of their customers with a duck?

It’s mind-boggling that they get away with it at a time when networking standards rule.  In every other market, price-levelers like TCP/IP, Ethernet, and multi-core CPUs are the things that allow customers to pay competitive prices for things, not usurious ones.  It’s why price-per-MIP on today’s computers is so small that the metric isn’t even followed any more, and why we can get huge bandwidth into our houses for less than we used to pay for long distance telephone calls.

Like it says on our PR boilerplate, “Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.”  They also have a distinct appreciation of snark aimed at proprietary vendors simply because they’ve looked behind the curtain and discovered it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.  Kudos to the Vyatta Community!

10 Things Big Networking Vendors Never Say >>

A Yankee Dandy

“Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop the power of an idea whose time has come.”
- Victor Hugo
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The networking industry has received a mighty thunderbolt from Zeus — Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, that is.

In its groundbreaking whitepaper, “The Virtual Enterprise Requires a Network That Is More than ‘Good Enough’,” the Yankee Group makes a clear argument about how virtualization (from server to desktop) has turned the network into a strategic point of competitive advantage for enterprises.  And that, they say, requires big changes.

For networks to achieve the kind of capability required by a virtualized enterprise, it’s time to slap the vermin off of us and approach network infrastructure selection in a radically new way. For that to happen, Yankee calls out two very fresh attitudes that must rule the day:

- “… network decision-makers can no longer settle for any part of the network infrastructure that is ‘good enough’ simply because it is from the market brand leader.”

- “Open and standards-based solutions need to be the norm, not the exception… closed, proprietary systems will only act as long-term barriers to adoption [of virtualization].”

These are huge statements.  And they’re about as subtle as a stucco bathtub.

Yankee’s rationale stems from an earlier whitepaper of theirs projecting that corporate network loads will increase 1,000% during the next five years, driven by worker mobility and the fact that supply-chain connectivity has eroded the border of the enterprise.  Clearly a change of this magnitude requires more than just accommodating more bandwidth; it requires having far more flexibility in how networks are deployed and managed.  Supporting a virtual enterprise network is a whole new game.

It means modern infrastructure must be in place everywhere, not just in the datacenter. Network edge infrastructure must be evaluated with the same kind of diligence traditionally given only to the data center iron. Product capability must rule the decision, not brand leadership because “All of the top inhibitors around broader use of virtualization are network-related or have network-related implications.” Key inhibitors they list, in order:

• Adding / moving virtual machines (VMs) among data centers
• Access and security policies to VMs
• Virtualization’s impact on compliance
• Isolating VMs from each other
• Inspecting traffic among VMs

One very interesting part of the paper is that Yankee did not advise the “incumbent vendor” to improve its edge infrastructure. The opposite, in fact; they seem to accept that won’t happen fast enough and defer to history saying, “… legacy vendors can’t protect their large install base and transition with the market simultaneously.”

Instead, they highlight the following guidance to customers:

• “Take an open, standards-based approach to networking.”

• “Be willing to use alternative vendors.”

It’s clear:  Open Networking’s tipping point is here, and virtualization is driving it.  Importantly, Vyatta is unique in our ability to meet the new requirements:  Open, standards-based, high-performance, secure, and virtualized.  It’s our time.

Cisco’s Big Grab

“The worm has turned.”
- Hunter S. Thompson
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It’s official:  2009 is the year that networking and computing merged. And the packets are hitting the fan.

The trends have been driving this direction for years.  How it all happened takes a long time to tell, but to summarize:
1.  Horsepower:  Servers continue their exponential price/performance drive, and networking software starts taking advantage of it.
2.  Greed:  Cisco ran out of market since they own most of it already, so they targeted the datacenter server market as a place to create new growth.

That’s the precarious setup: Networking runs well on servers now, and the largest networking vendor in the world decides they’re going into the server business.  Interesting combination of flammable gases… now light a match:

3. Flashpoint:  Virtualization pulls networking onto servers.

Whoa!  Michael Dell’s eyebrows just burned off.  How did this flashpoint happen?

Start by looking at a traditional data center. There are tons of servers and tons of network switches.  Cables connect the two, and networks are configured.  If you physically move a server you have to physically change the cables and the network configuration.

Now look at a virtualized data center. Virtual machines are all over the place, a few per server.  Each VM has to be connected to a switch, so the traffic can flow to and from it.  But if the VM is moved, the network connection just broke. Packets are all over the floor.

This obviously won’t stand; one of the key benefits of virtualization is flexibility to move VMs around willy-nilly. This is especially true in the ultimate virtualization play, cloud computing.  So how does this get fixed?

Enter the vSwitch, a software component of the virtualization layer.  VMWare has one; it runs on the server.   Cisco has one; it runs on the server.  There’s even an open-source vSwitch project, also server-based.  Any vendor offering a virtualization platform will include this kind of networking in it, out of necessity.

Things were heading this way before Cisco decided to get into the server biz, but it’s all a huge kerfuffle right now because they’ve been so calculating in their approach.  It takes some cheek — and a lot of fresh moves — to challenge IBM and HP on their own turf.  And Cisco may have underestimated the fight in the dog; IBM is now promoting other networking vendors instead, and HP is on them like a rottweiler on an olive loaf.

But lest we miss The Big Point, networking and computing are converging, driven by virtualization.  And Cisco has a grand plan to control it all. Their vSwitch has — hold onto your hats — PROPRIETARY PROTOCOLS!  This is the game they play better than any other company on the planet… and their plan is to do it all over again, this time with their proprietary vSwitch.  And if you think they’ll let other vendors interoperate easily with that control point, you’re in for a big, sorry surprise.  Cisco’s vSwitch is their Trojan Horse.

Other vendors are working their responses, but they’d better hurry.  Cisco’s out to steal their milk money.

Meanwhile, watching this industry trend unfold is an acknowledgment of the Vyatta vision.  From our inception over four years ago, Vyatta has been delivering a complete network OS that is portable to standard server hardware and popular virtual hypervisors.  The industry continues to move our way.

Thank you Cisco. Vyatta is more relevant than ever.

Virtualization Changes Networking

“I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
- Alice In Wonderland
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Networking is software. Nothing proves this fact more concretely than network virtualization.

I made this point to a Wall Street analyst the other day. As I described how effective Vyatta software is at networking, it put him back on his heels. He was surprised at first, but as a strong Linux follower he quickly regained his balance as he realized why it made sense. Then I described how Vyatta has been virtualized since day one, and he tipped backward again. Why not, I asked? We’re a software company, and the V-word naturally follows. In fact the virtualized version of Vyatta Community Edition makes up a hefty portion of our total downloads. And by the way, we already run in the Amazon cloud.

That’s when he fell completely over.

Conceptually, it’s an easy thing to grasp. When applications are physically spread out, a physical network connects them. When apps are virtualized, a virtual network connects them. It just makes sense. After all, the reason for going with virtual machines is to get much better hardware utilization and flexibility. So why tether your new-world VMs to an old-world network? That would be like choosing immobility as a form of transportation.

IT architectures are moving forward, and that includes the network. Vyatta is a trendsetter in this area, running today on VMware, Citrix XenServer, XenSource, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM. In addition, the introduction of vSwitch capabilities by others takes the virtualized networking movement even farther.

The implications of this architectural evolution are huge. Imagine absorbing racks of networking gear into a few powerful, inexpensive x86 servers. Picture it: more space, fewer cables, less energy and heat. And the flexibility! Spin up networking VMs as you need them. Create firewalls between applications virtually, segment traffic easily, add expensive VPN capability without the proprietary expense… the list goes on.

The benefits of virtualized networking are certainly not limited to the datacenter. Many users run Vyatta as a VM on a shared server in branch offices. Run it next to a virtual print server, a virtual PBX, virtual email server… the phrase “branch in a box” comes to mind. Imagine the benefits of eliminating entire classes of hardware devices.

And ultimately, virtual networking belongs in the cloud. Maybe it’s Amazon’s, maybe it’s your virtual private cloud. Either way, virtualized networking will play a central role.

So yes, virtualization changes networking. Networking is software. And Vyatta is at the forefront.

QED.