Om Malik wrote yesterday about vyatta in particular, and about a collection of enterprise open souce communications platforms that are starting to make inroads into the telecommunications market. His entry is Here Comes Open Source Telecomm.
Vyatta is building a business model around the XORP project (eXtensible Open Router Project), and is aimed at nothing less than taking on Cisco and Juniper. With Asterisk on the PBX side, core linux capabilites such as IP tables and traffic shaping, and a whole variety of open source Linux friendly packages like Nagios, Nessus, SNORT, etc., one starts to be able to build a fairly robust and complete set of communications capabilities. For, uhhh, free.
I’m currently aware of a company rehosting it’s entire infrastructure onto these technologies (well, OK, I’m a bit more than “aware”, I’m helping them). They are projecting very large cost savings and ROI.
Om makes one small point in his article, that just hit me with such intensity that I had to write this post. He says:
Now you can buy extremely powerful processors like Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron chips for a few hundred dollars, run special networking software on them, and get similar performance. There are nearly half-a-dozen open source projects that capitalize on the cheap processing power.
I realized how essential the AMD products are to these efforts. First off, they are damn powerful and priced well. But, unlike big brother Intel, AMD seems content to sell fast processors without discrimination. Intel’s communications sector spun down a path of special purpose chips, “communications platforms”, and complicated and confusing what not. But worse, Intel seems happy to compromise pure processor performance to be cozy with vested interests. It seems to suit them just fine to sit back in smoke-filled board rooms and divy up the world with telcos, software giants, and other monoplisitic bad boys. If it weren’t for AMD, I bet we’d be seeing “Communications” versions of Intel chips, with built-in DRM and packet inspection hardware, that couldn’t quite support the type of projects that people are running on the Opteron. Remember the itanium …
I think we in the IP Communications industry owe a great debt of gratitude to AMD for their enabling products.
I’d write more on this topic, but I set tonight aside to start my home build of what I hope to be a smoking fast new desktop workstation for the home office. Athalon 64, Fedora Core 4, of course — what else?!?!