Cabletron to roll out VPN gear, apps

By Jim Duffy
Network World Fusion, 06/10/99

Cabletron this week announced a suite of virtual private network (VPN) products for central site, remote branch office and small office/home office (SOHO) locations.

The products include new VPN routing platforms and directory-enabled Spectrum service-level management applications. These new products were expected.

The new routers include the SmartSwitch Router (SSR) 600 and 700 series. The SSR 600 is available as a stand-alone platform or as an integrated, high-speed interface module for Cabletron's SmartSwitch 2000/6000/9000 series of switches.

The SSR 600 features two 10/100 Ethernet interfaces and two modular WAN interfaces. Cabletron says it can support hundreds of site-to-site VPN tunnels, using IPSecurity (IPSec) and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) VPN protocols with wire-speed, hardware-based compression, Data Encryption Standard, Triple-DES and public-key acceleration.

The SSR 710 features two Ethernet interfaces, four serial WAN ports and two ISDN Primary Rate Interfaces with hardware-based compression, DES and Triple-DES. L2TP and IPSec are also supported on this platform.

Cabletron also announced VPN enhancements to its current line of SSR 100, 200 and 500 SOHO and branch office routers to support VPN tunneling based on IPSec and L2TP.

The new Spectrum applications include: a Web-based interface to configure VPN services across multiple devices; directory services providing storage of configuration, security and quality-of-service (QoS) policies on a per-user, application or device basis; service-level agreement (SLA) monitoring to give service providers the information necessary to deliver QoS commitments to customers; and traffic accounting of VPN services to let service providers generate usage reports and verify delivery of committed SLAs to their end-user customers.

Lastly, Cabletron says it has agreed to license Information Resource Engineering's SafeNet cryptography technology for use in its SSR 2000, 8000 and 8600 routers. SafeNet will allow Cabletron to deliver VPN services at multiple OC-3 or multiple 100M bit/sec throughput levels, the company says.

The VPN software for the SSRs costs from $195 to $295 and will be available in July and September. The SSR 600 costs $2,495 and the SSR 710 costs $6,995, both will ship in August. Serial interface and ISDN Basic Rate Interface modules for these routers cost $495. A 64K bit/sec digital data service module with integral DSU/CSU costs $695. A T-1/E-1 module with integral DSU/CSU costs $825 and an encryption compression module costs $995. All of these modules will also be available in August.