Vyatta Inc - the company that builds commercially supported, open-source networking solutions which provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors - announced yesterday the immediate availability of the third major release of their Open Source Linux distribution. Vyatta 3.0 combines firewall, VPN and router capabilities into a single and unique solution which tries to deliver twice the performance of proprietary network solutions at half the price. This third version of Vyatta brings many new features and improvements over previous versions. Through the major enhancements, we can notice:

￭ IPSec VPN - Vyatta comes now with dedicated site-to-site (branch-to-branch or branch-to-HQ) VPN (Virtual Private Networking) and supports the most widely used cryptographic algorithms, including AES (both 128 and 256-bit versions), MD5, SHA1 and 3DES. Moreover, IPsec VPN can now be configured in a cluster of multiple Vyatta units with fail-over mechanisms that provide high availability for mission-critical services.
￭ Multi-link PPP (MLPPP) - MLPPP allows customers to increase WAN bandwidth by using multiple low-speed circuits, typically T1 links, in parallel, enabling a pay-as-you-grow strategy instead of paying the high cost of a T3 upgrade.
￭ BGP scaling and security enhancements - Vyatta comes now an improved BGP scaling that provides faster routing convergence with many peers. Moreover, MD5-based neighbor authentication delivers improved routing security and Per-BGP peer policy support makes it easier than ever to control route propagation. Last but not least, the new monitoring and troubleshooting commands make Vyatta easier to use than ever.

The CEO of Vyatta, Kelly Herrell says: "We have proven the performance and reliability of our open-source networking solution in large, demanding networks, making Vyatta a no-brainer alternative to over-priced, inflexible, proprietary products [...] Vyatta is the most flexible network infrastructure solution in the world and can be deployed on server blades, dedicated appliances, or virtual machines using VMWare and Xen. As a result, Vyatta is a universal solution to networking problems in the branch office, at headquarters, and in the data center, for both enterprises and service providers."

You can download Vyatta right now from Softpedia.