April 3, 2000

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Vendors Poised To Offer Innovative VPN Features

By Terry Sweeney

ou've never seen such versatility from tunnels--encrypted IP tunnels, that is. As the conduit for data that flows across an enterprise into the wide area and then on to a workgroup partner, major supplier, or handheld-device user, virtual private networks are poised to offer several innovative features in the coming year.

So what are customers asking for? Encrypted voice, tunneled video, and classes of service, says Maaz Sheikh, VPN product manager at Concentric Network Corp. "And service providers are looking for vendors to help provide all that," he says. Concentric "will be trying to get as much interoperability [between gateways and networks] as possible to give customers a very smooth implementation. It may not be a feature-rich future, but it'll be a smooth implementation."

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), which holds the promise of mixing IP, ATM, and frame-relay traffic seamlessly while dissolving public and private network boundaries, is being tested by several service providers and has already been deployed commercially by AT&T. It's also seen as the vehicle for delivering quality of service and classes of service to IP networks such as VPNs.

"We're testing MPLS and trying to identify how we'd deploy it and what kinds of applications we'd support and services we'd offer," says Robert McKinney, director of VPN and Internet security at GTE Internetworking. "But our customers are unsure how they'll deploy it. Some have said they'll deploy four to 10 classes of service. Mapping those to a network class of service across the wide area gets really complex."

McKinney says GTE Internetworking is still looking into how to offer voice on a VPN and trying to determine what customers might want to do with encrypted voice capability. "We can get it to work," he says, "but would someone really want to do that?

And how does the network deal with an encrypted call and an unencrypted call? Does every call suffer the same fate?"

Roy Milano, manager of IS at Hitachi Metals America Ltd. in Purchase, N.Y., is already on VPN's cutting edge with a desktop videoconferencing trial he's got under way. "We'll use it between design engineers in Detroit, Japan, and the plants. They can have face-to-face meetings and avoid making the two- or three-day trips for a two-hour meeting to discuss CAD diagrams. We'll try it out and see if it does anything for us," he says.

Later this year, Hitachi will begin examining voice over IP on its VPN. "We don't have a lot of interoffice voice traffic, but there's enough interoffice fax that we need to look at it," Milano says.

Tom Stribling, network services manager at Lorde Co., a maker of motion- and vibration-control devices in Cary, N.C., says there's a lot of market fuss about voice over IP, but he remains leery of it. "I keep reading the literature--everyone that's used voice over IP says it's really neat but still not quite ready," he says. "We're more a state-of-the-market company than a state-of-the-art company."

Return to main story, "Businesses Lock In On VPN Outsourcing Options."

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