VPNet service expansion

At ComNet, VPNet Technologies will introduce two products to help service providers expand their virtual private network services-the newest release of VPNware software and the VSU-1100 platform.

"VPNs are growing up," said Richard Kagan, VPNet's marketing vice president. "This stuff is getting pretty big pretty quick and overwhelming the capabilities of some service providers." Performance bottlenecks can arise because VPN traffic requires much more computation than regular Internet protocol traffic. Also, IPSec-compatible remote access over VPNs involves security associations, or peer-to-peer security relationships enabled by unique information shared between remote users and the VPN service unit at company headquarters.

VPNware 2.5 solves that problem with proprietary technology, the Dyna-Policy download. Administrators upload remote access policies for each user to the VPN service unit's central database or an outboard Radius database. When remote users authenticate before a session, their policy information is downloaded automatically in five seconds via secure sockets layer. Administrators can purge that information after each session, enhancing security.

The VSU-1100, offering 10 times the performance of VPNet's earlier platform, will sustain full-duplex T-3 wire speeds of 90 Mb/s while supporting 5000 simultaneous remote sessions of IPSec traffic. The hardware is targeted at managed VPN services hosting enterprise, remote access and secure intranet-extranet VPNs and is suited to applications outsourcing, said Kagan.

"If a service is doing intranet Web hosting, e-commerce or enterprise applications hosting, they can put a VSU-1100 in front of a server farm and serve up intranet sites or internal applications across the public network to their customers, who have corresponding VPN service units at their locations," he said. The VSU-1100 is available as a stand-alone unit or as part of a turnkey VPN solution.

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