Open networking solution now with SSL-based OpenVPN and IPS

Routing and security software Vyatta Community Edition reached version 5. VC5 greatly expands Vyatta’s security feature set, adding SSL-based OpenVPN, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and web URL filtering among many other improvements.

For the majority of today’s networking projects, Vyatta consistently outperforms proprietary networking solutions and offers users an average cost savings of 50 to 80 percent. As IT professionals and network administrators around the globe are seeking affordable networking alternatives, they are finding that Vyatta delivers the features, performance, and services they need without the severe price-penalty of proprietary offerings.

New features in VC5 include:

• Improved VPN Security with OpenVPN – VC5 supports OpenVPN, a popular open source VPN technology that provides high levels of site-to-site and remote access security and great interoperability even in the presence of NAT, which protocols like IPSec find challenging.
• Enhanced Security via Intrusion Prevention – Vyatta has also increased security by supporting intrusion protection system (IPS) and traffic filtering based on the inspection of traffic content. VC5 detects intrusion attempts using intrusion signatures and network-based detection mechanisms. VC5 also prevents malicious behavior by dropping packets associated with a detected attack.
• Improved Performance with Web Caching and Ethernet Bonding – VC5 helps overall network performance by decreasing WAN bandwidth requirements using web caching. The system can now be configured to act as a web proxy server for web caching, eliminating the need to retrieve the same data multiple times for separate clients. Ethernet Bonding allows users to group multiple parallel Ethernet links together into larger virtual links, improving both performance and network reliability
• Support for Network Access Policies via URL Filtering – Vyatta supports administration-based website blocking through URL filtering. Acting as a web proxy server for URL filtering, VC5 determines whether a requested URL is in a category marked for blocking, and if so returns an error message to the user
• New Web-based Graphical User Interface – VC5 delivers a new web-based GUI using a familiar hierarchical configuration model. The GUI offers a full complement of configuration and monitoring capabilities, giving network administrators full access to VC5-based systems using a web browser.
• Enhanced DNS Capabilities for SME Environments – DNS forwarding and Dynamic DNS support allow small or branch offices to connect to the Internet with a minimum of extra infrastructure, reducing costs and complexity.
• Improved Virtualization Performance – Vyatta has worked well in virtualized environments for years, but VC5 adds optimized network interface and mass storage drivers that improve performance for VMware and Xen virtual machines.
• Additional Hardware Support – VC5 now supports RFC 1483 Bridged Ethernet over ADSL, Synchronous Serial Cards, wireless modems (3G), and RAID-1.