In late January, Dorado Software Inc. pushed the envelope on dynamic configuration of VPNs across multiple vendors' hardware. At the same time, WorldCom Inc. brought per-VPN tunnel performance monitoring to customers of its fully managed, site-to-site VPN services.
Dorado Software hopes to make its Redcell VPN Service Center "the industry benchmark for rapid development of device drivers" for configuration across wide-area and enterprise network VPN routing systems made up of multiple vendors, says Jerry McDowell, vice president of technology and market research for Dorado.
While each vendor executes VPN tunnel configuration in a unique fashion, "we can build drivers to any box to abstract enough information to set up VPNs in that box" via a common web-based interface, McDowell says, explaining that users are able to select end points and to then associate a user, a service or a security level with a port. "The interface is network aware without forcing the user to be a network engineer."
Drivers developed so far cover products from Cisco Systems Inc., Extreme Networks Inc., Foundry Networks Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc.
The trending information can help managed VPN customers better plan. If one finds out, for instance, that during the last week of each month an accounting upload degrades VPN performance among two or three certain sites, "you could then allocate more bandwidth through our bandwidth shaping for that period next month," Wells says.
"This enables the customer to outsource the management but to retain control," she adds. "It also saves WorldCom costs in crunching the data and reports for the customer, and it tells us where we need to go next."
