Dave Roberts, VP of strategy and marketing at he San Mateo, California-based ISV, said one of the main additions to the product was in the area of connectivity.
Version 0.5 didn’t support serial T1/E1 links, he said. We’ve also added support for firewalls and a Web UI.
The product is free to download from the company’s website on an individual pilot basis, while the payment of a subscription guarantees access to updates and information on software ports. OFR runs on a standard X.86 architecture and can route up to a couple of Gbps, Roberts went on.
It’s not carrier-grade, but it’s definitely suited to the branch office running a T1/E1 or DSL link, even up to a midsize enterprise core, he said.
As such, the platform may well appeal to companies building branch-in-a-box (BiaB) devices, for which the edge security functions of a U box and a router are table stakes, with differentiation being sought with other features such as WiFi (e.g. Samsung’s iBG range) or regular wired VoIP (Siemens’ HiPath 2000, for instance). In particular, it would seem a natural choice for ODMs in the Far East, making BiaBs under contract to bigger brand names.
Roberts said that, while approaches have been made directly to Vyatta by US network companies about using, there has been a lot of interest from Asia in terms of website hits and downloads.
