Commodity Compute goes Truckin'

It's been a few weeks since I posted here - I've been traveling on business and am now just catching up a bit. I saw the new release on the Concentro portable data center from Rackable today. This seems like a very interesting way to scale commodity compute and to bring it where required on a temporary or semi-permanent basis. Don't have a data center - we'll bring it to you! BTW - anyone need a router or firewall running on those servers? :)

Performance Testing

One of the main issues that people have with using x86 architectures for their compute or networking environment is performance. For the past 15 years the industry has pounded into everyone's head that you must have proprietary processing power and custom hardware to do the basic functions of a router, firewall and VPN concentrator: forward packets, handle layer 2/3 table maintenance, do stateful packet filtering and terminate encrypted tunnels.

Since our inception, we Vyattans never believed that and we always knew the x86 architectures could handle the router and firewall needs of small-to-medium enterprises.

The first validated third party proof of this fact went live onto our website yesterday in the form of a report from The Tolly Group. You can download the results here. This report compares the Vyatta system on a Dell PowerEdge PC to a Cisco 2821 ISR.

Two items of note about this report:

• We know performance is not everything that you look for in a router, firewall and VPN concentrator. Still, knowing the performance characteristics of the product you are using can help in network planning and design.
• We know we are comparing ourselves at present to a fairly low-end Cisco ISR. And check out the price/performance results - twice the performance for half the price.

Stay tuned for more results in the future - you won't be disappointed!