Extranet switch aims for VPN bonanza

Start-up vendor New Oak Communications is throwing its hat into the increasingly active virtual private network business. The Acton, Mass.-based company will demonstrate its NOC 4000 Extranet Access Switch, announced late last month, at this week's Networld+Interop '97 show in Atlanta.

The VPN business has been escalating quickly as private network users turn to public network operators to outsource management of their complex networking arrangements. Carriers, in turn, have started to see new revenue opportunities through VPN management.

However, the environment they must transition from is one of separate infrastructures supporting services such as POTS, frame relay and Internet, intranet and extended intranet traffic.

"No one had an idea of how they wanted to grow these services, and the result is that you have separate networks for separate applications," said Tom Pincince, founder and executive vice president of New Oak.

New Oak's solution to that confusion is an integrated hardware processor backed with software-based management capabilities. The NOC 4000 integrates many of the aspects of a multinetwork, multi-element, multiservice VPN, such as routing, firewalling, tunneling, encryption and authentication (see figure). It integrates the previously separate remote access services via Internet networking.

Internet-based remote access on VPNs likely will grow quickly as the industry invests in products such as the NOC 4000 that can integrate multiple services onto Internet backbones, Forrester Research recently reported.

Perhaps more significantly, it reduces the number of required management systems to only one. A management system might otherwise be needed for every VPN element.

Once the NOC 4000 is in place, network managers can administer all VPN functions-such as creating distinct user groups or firewalls- through their Web browsers, said Pincince.

AT&T and GTE have been evaluating beta versions of the product that scale to 2000 users simultaneously.