Brocade confirms its SDN deployment with Vyatta. Will Vyatta undergo major changes? The Community 6.6rc1 version seems nowhere to be found?
Real-world use case
You're following the evolution of the SDN market: Brocade has just confirmed the acquisition of Vyatta, a strategic turning point for virtual routers.
Brocade and Vyatta: things are moving!
In November 2012, the acquisition of Vyatta, the startup specializing in SDN, was confirmed. SDN deployment represents the future generation of virtual network architecture (cloud). We can see that Brocade is absorbing Vyatta, as shown by the switch of the domain name:
What will become of Vyatta?
Vyatta shouldn't disappear, since Brocade plans to use Vyatta's technology to offer a highly virtualized, dynamic network infrastructure. Groupe-ocealis, a Brocade reseller in my region, confirmed this information to me. I invite you to learn more about Vyatta: silicon.fr article.
The Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter
Currently, following this acquisition, only the "Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter" remains. The current version offers a sixty-day evaluation period before activation of the "Vyatta vRouter" is required. This 5400 version already existed before the domain name migration.
Getting the Community version back
The unavailability of Vyatta Community isn't reassuring, is this really the end? First of all, Vyatta is heavily involved in the Open Source community with OpenStack. Brocade will settle into the Open Source and OpenStack community quickly. It also seems unlikely that a Community version will become available again anytime soon (to be continued). Moreover, the solutions Brocade intends to roll out under OpenStack in 2014 (see article) are in line with the philosophy of the Open Source and OpenStack community.
For now, let's be patient. For anyone interested, I'm sharing the latest release of Vyatta. You can contact me directly on this page.
Update: the vyatta.org website is accessible again with the download page. The only snag is the following error when requesting a download...
The requested page "/files/downloads/vc6.6/vyatta-livecd_VC6.6R1_i386.iso" could not be found.
Conclusion
This article looks back at Brocade's acquisition of Vyatta and its consequences for users of the solution, in particular the uncertainty around the availability of the Community version following the shift to the single Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter product. It relays the information obtained from a local Brocade reseller as well as a link to the trade press. An update notes that the vyatta.org website reopened, although downloading the Community version remained unavailable at that time. This post illustrates the questions the SDN community had at the time about this acquisition.