Open Source Router Cuts Costs by Nearly 87%

Vyatta and Sangoma Technologies announced a deal that will put Vyatta’s Open Flexible Router (OFR) on Sangoma’s WANPIPE PCI cards.

Vyatta's OFR is an open source routing code based on the XORP routing project out of the International Computer Sciences Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley. The code includes OSPF, BGP and RIP routing protocols, stateful firewalling and network address translation (NAT). Vyatta has tried to build a development community around OFR much the way Red Hat has done with Linux.

The code will ride on Sangoma Technologies’ current PCI cards supporting its WANPIPE driver. The cards can ship with serial and digital interfaces from T1 to T3.

By combining the two products together, the companies expect to save at least 50 per cent over traditional closed-source products. A Cisco 1721 Modular Access Router with a DSL interface, for example, can run $1,199. By contrast, Sangoma's WANPIPE PCI card will run $150. The Vyatta code is downloadable. Companies will need to supply their own LINUX-based servers.

Vyatta expects to an appliance running the OFR routing code this summer.