Vyatta Secures Virtual Desktops for the University of Florida

BELMONT, CA--(Marketwire - April 21, 2009) - Vyatta, the leader in open networking and network virtualization, today announced that the University of Florida's Health Science Center has implemented Vyatta's award winning routing and security software to secure its virtualized desktop infrastructure. Having done extensive research, the university concluded Vyatta was the only solution to achieve its goals of routing and security for its virtualized data center.

The Health Science Center at the University of Florida first created a virtual desktop infrastructure based on VMware to secure its medical data. This infrastructure centralized user desktops in the data center and displayed those desktops on local user machines throughout the network, containing the medical data and ensuring that it was handled properly. As a side benefit, centralizing the user desktops greatly eased the management problems associated with general software updates. By adding Vyatta to the VMware-based architecture, the Health Science Center was able to deliver a new level of security and traffic management that was unavailable from other vendors. Unlike physical network infrastructure, Vyatta can be deployed into the VMware virtualization environment and managed using the same tools as the virtualized desktops. Using Vyatta's NAT, DHCP, firewall, and routing functionality within the virtual environment, the Health Science Center can now heavily segment LAN and WAN traffic and secure sensitive research materials from users inside and outside the network.

"Vyatta has allowed us to 'go virtual' in every respect," said Trey Johnson, IT Expert at the University of Florida. "The new infrastructure allows us to provide seamless, secure access to virtual desktops to external users in a safe and highly manageable fashion. If we had used physical network infrastructure for this, we would have sacrificed a lot of manageability and driven up our costs. I can recommend Vyatta whole-heartedly to any organization that is looking for a robust networking and security solution that plays well in a virtualized environment."

Vyatta runs on standard x86 hardware and can be virtualized with modern hypervisors, including Citrix Xen and VMware. Vyatta delivers a full set of networking features that allow customers to connect, protect, virtualize, and optimize their networks, improving performance, reducing costs, and increasing manageability and flexibility over proprietary networking solutions. Vyatta has been deployed by hundreds of customers world-wide in both virtual and non-virtual environments.

"IT managers are realizing that virtual infrastructures benefit from the ability to manage and secure IP traffic within them as much as physical environments do," said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Vyatta. "Vyatta has been designed as a software-based appliance that eliminates the hardware dependencies of proprietary networking to deliver routing and security functionality to a virtual environment as well as it does a physical environment. Whether your virtualization solution is Citrix Xen, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or something else, Vyatta can help you optimize your virtualized IT infrastructure."

About Vyatta

Vyatta builds commercially supported, open-source networking solutions that provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors. Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products. Vyatta customers know that Vyatta's Linux-based router, firewall and VPN software gives them a level of control unavailable from proprietary solutions. Vyatta customers are thought leaders who recognize the benefits of flexible deployment options -- x86 hardware, blade servers, virtualization -- of freedom to integrate applications of their choice, and of the economic and performance advantages of commodity hardware and components. For more info, visit http://www.vyatta.com.

Contact Information: Contact: Andrew Evangelista Eastwick Communications 650.480.4056 andrew@eastwick.com