Citrix Systems has found a new way to be a thorn in Cisco Systems’ side. Indeed, Citrix is among the investors pumping money into Vyatta — which positions itself as the open source alternative to Cisco Systems. The Citrix-Vyatta relationship involves networking, cloud computing, virtualization … and money. Here’s the scoop.
This is Vyatta’s third round of funding, and it includes a combined $10 million from Citrix and such existing Vyatta investors as Comcast Interactive Capital, Panorama Capital, and ArrowPath Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Gordon Payne, senior VP and GM manager of the Delivery Systems Division at Citrix, has joined Vyatta’s board of directors.
The Citrix-Vyatta relationship seems to focus on networking, virtualization and cloud computing. According to a Vyatta press release issued today:
Vyatta runs on standard x86 hardware and can be virtualized with modern hypervisors, including the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform. Vyatta delivers a full set of networking features that allow customers to connect, protect, virtualize, and optimize their networks, improving performance, reducing costs, and increasing manageability and flexibility over proprietary networking solutions. Vyatta has been deployed by hundreds of customers world-wide in both virtual and non-virtual environments.
Translation: Citrix is trying to disrupt Cisco’s networking empire at the very same time that Cisco and Citrix increasingly compete in the online meeting and collaboration market (Cisco WebEx vs. Citrix’s GoToMeeting).
Who Is Vyatta?
Vyatta currently represents a small threat to Cisco’s networking dominance. However, Vyatta does seem to have momentum as a provider of open source networking solutions.
Vyatta had roughly 100 channel partners as of August 2008, and The VAR Guy thinks the company’s partner program has grown significantly since that time. Also, Vyatta landed on The Open Source 50 — a report that tracks the most promising open source partner programs.
Cisco Embraces, Replaces Open Source
Meanwhile, Cisco is finding new ways to embrace open source while continuing to compete with various open source startups.
For example, Cisco has been working closely with Linux developers as part of an Application eXtension Platform (AXP) programming contest. Also, Cisco on June 4, 2009, quietly announced a new product that interoperates with open source IP PBXes.
Despite those efforts, The VAR Guy believes Vyatta and Digium, in particular, represent long-term threats to the Cisco empire — much in the way that Linux has been chipping away at Microsoft’s Windows empire.
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Tags: Citrix Systems Vyatta | Citrix vs. Cisco Systems | Open Source Networking | Vyatta vs. Cisco Systems | WebEx vs. GoToMeeting
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Hey Var Guy we’ve been watching Vyatta and seen it go into four of our customer networks since January. We weren’t involved in the Vyatta sales but it might be time to give them a call. We’re a Citrix partner that also does some procurve work so you can see where I’m going with this.
Frankie: Let us know if you do any deals involving Citrix-Vyatta. The VAR Guy would like to hear more.
-TVG
FWIW….We took a hard look at a possible large scale Cisco replacement with Vyatta. The project never got off the ground after Vyatta reps informed us that there is no support for VOIP devices in the routers such as PRIs, FXO and FXS cards. Vyatta seeme to be just a router platform with no VOIP support ie, interfaces, gateway protocol support.
BD: The VAR Guy intends to speak with Vyatta later this week and will raise the issues you shared here. Thanks for the perspective.
-TVG
@BD: PRI, FXO & FXS cards are not VoIP but legacy PSTN interfaces. You are probably looking for a VoIP PSTN gateway device (something like the Cisco 26xx concept). I would be surprised if Vyatta offered that since they are not in the VoIP PSTN gateway business which is an entirely different and pretty complex ballgame. The bugs I have seen in Cisco’s SIP firmware are a testament to that
Cisco obviously has the cash to develop or buy VoIP/PSTN technology and integrate it into their kit. But the fact that Vyatta by itself doesn’t meet your requirements doesn’t mean that it can’t be part of a solution that could. You can get a blade server and run Vyatta on a couple. And then run a VoIP PSTN gateway like Freeswitch (www.freeswitch.org) on another set. Different approach but very powerful, flexible and it doesn’t come with the Cisco price tag. But this requires one to think outside of the box and deviate from the Cisco “integrated solution” party line. Well worth it if you ask me.
There are a couple of different options for voice support on Vyatta today. First, since Vyatta is package-compatible with Debian, you could simply install something like Asterisk on top of Vyatta. It would not be integrated, but it would run. If you do this, you would also be able to use compatible FXO/FXS/etc. cards with some driver work to recompile things against the Vyatta kernel. If you’re just interested in VoIP, you could also use virtualization (Xen, VMware, whatever), and run Vyatta and your voice app (Asterisk, Freeswitch, whatever) in separate VMs. The downside here is that you lose access to the hardware (though even that is somewhat possible with something like PCI pass-through with Xen). Finally, as Patrick says, you can use different blades in the same chassis or simply different 1U servers. Yes, that’s completely non-integrated, but that may not really matter much if the price is right. The nice thing about Vyatta is that the choice is yours. Over time, expect to see more integration and better out-of-the-box voice support from Vyatta.
Disclaimer: I’m the VP of strategy and marketing for Vyatta.
I just started looking into Vyatta and like “BD” my company needs the VOIP gateway + FXS functionality. I work for a clothing retail company and at each store we only have need for 2 analog phones and 1 fax. During my search I just found a company called Positron that makes a “PBX PCI Adapter” that contains Asterisk. See the information here:
http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/pbx-pci-adapter/articles/66507-positrons-voip-enabled-pbx-systems-compatible-with-vyattas.htm
Jorge: Thanks for the tip. Does that mean your company ultimately went with the Positron/Asterisk solution? If so how is it working out?
-TVG