From the ‘Open Source Acquisitions’ files:
The first time I had ever spoken with Vyatta, it was about the company’s open source routing Linux distribution. That was back in 2006 and while many things have changed, some things haven’t.
Vyatta Core (VC) 6.5 was released this week marking the latest iteration of the company’s open source routing platform. The new release includes a policy-based routing engine for traffic prioritization. It also includes some interesting VPN features including a Virtual Tunnel Interface (VTI).
“A VTI provides a termination point for a site-to-site IPsec VPN tunnel and allows it to behave like routable interfaces,” Vyatta staffer Stephen Harpster wrote. “In addition to simplifying the IPsec configuration, it enables many common routing capabilities to be used because the endpoint is associated with an actual interface.”
VC 6.5 also now supported IPsec for IPv6.
VC remains open source goodness as it has for the past six years. What has changed is the Vyatta as a company has expanded with a Software Defined Networking focus. Vyatta has also recently been acquired by networking vendor Brocade.
I always worry that when an open source vendor gets acquired that the core project is at risk. When I spoke with Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell about the acquisition earlier this month, I specifically asked him about the open source core. He told me that open source is central to Vyatta and is set to remain so.
The VC 6.5 release to my knowledge is the first Vyatta open source release in the Brocade era. Let’s hope that trend toward a vibrant and evolving open source Vyatta Core release continues for many years to come.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
