Managed IP VPNs present a dizzying variety

Despite a slow economy, IP VPN services are expected to grow dramatically over the next few years. According to recent research from In-Stat/MDR, IP VPN service revenues should increase at an annual rate of 33% between 2001 and 2006.

Of 436 organizations with more than 1,000 employees interviewed by In-Stat/MDR, 90% are either deploying an IP VPN or plan to do so within the next two years.

With this explosion in VPN interest, what should users look for when hunting for a VPN vendor?

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Despite a slow economy, IP VPN services are expected to grow dramatically over the next few years. According to recent research from In-Stat/MDR, IP VPN service revenues should increase at an annual rate of 33% between 2001 and 2006.

Of 436 organizations with more than 1,000 employees interviewed by In-Stat/MDR, 90% are either deploying an IP VPN or plan to do so within the next two years.

With this explosion in VPN interest, what should users look for when hunting for a VPN vendor?

For Phillip Jones, general manager of IS for Utility Engineering, a power plant design firm in Minneapolis, reliability and bandwidth were important. Until a year ago, Utility Engineering operated a 10-drop frame relay network from WorldCom.

However, two problems arose with the frame relay network, according to Jones. The first was that all the branch offices, connected in a hub-and-spoke design to the company's headquarters, had to send data to that headquarters, which would have tLANs research center</a><br>
The latest news, reviews, how-tos and more.</p>o push it out again to the other branches. This means that Utility Engineering wasn't using its WAN bandwidth very efficiently.

The second problem was that Utility Engineering began exceeding the bandwidth on its frame relay committed information rates (CIR). Most of the data consisted of bandwidth-intensive CAD files. Once the CIR was exceeded, transmissions were resent, further exacerbating the bottleneck.

"We found that boosting the CIR was going to cost us a lot more money," Jones says. "So we went to WorldCom and told them they needed to find us something else, and they came back with an IP VPN."

Utility Engineering's IP VPN relies on the same T-1 drops as its frame relay network. But now the company can use the full T-1 of bandwidth at a cost slightly less than what it paid for the frame network.

The IP VPN is fully meshed, so sites can communicate directly with one another. Communications don't have to go through corporate headquarters.

And because all of the traffic runs over WorldCom's Tier 1 UUNET backbone, Utility Engineering can get solid service-level agreements (SLA), Jones says.

One feature Jones says all VPN users should look for is a managed Web interface to monitor their VPNs' performance. WorldCom's VPN Interactive Performance Monitoring system (VIPer) has been useful for checking SLA compliance, he says. VIPer lets users see daily, weekly and monthly statistics on their VPNs. Users also get to view charts showing how their VPN performance compares to the SLAs.

Another feature that Jones likes is that the VPN is fully managed. WorldCom deals with any connection problems. In the past, when a frame relay line went down, Utility Engineering first had to figure out whether the local phone company or WorldCom was to blame and then hand the problem off to the appropriate party, Jones says.

While Jones uses WorldCom's fully managed service for his permanent sites, he relies on T-1s from Global Crossing and VPN boxes that Utility Engineering to connect to job sites on which the company is working.