Converged Access consolidates branch-office gear

Converged Access this week unveiled managed branch-office hardware designed to reduce the number of devices deployed in remote locations and simplify their installation.

Branch Services Gateway (BSG) combines a branch-office router, firewall and VPN gateway with VoIP support and traffic management.

Designed for offices with 50 employees or fewer, BSG includes an eight-port 10/100 managed Ethernet switch as well as analog phone ports that can be used to make calls if the IP network fails.

Converged Access also announced its Converged Provisioning System (CPS) software for managing large numbers of BSG devices via a single console. With CPS, administrators can set a single policy template for one device and have it propagated to all the other devices.

“This is appealing not so much to the guy with 10 offices, but to the guy who has 500 offices with 10 people working in them,” says John Bartlett, vice president of consulting firm NetForecast.

Bartlett says the alternative has been installing multiple devices in branch offices, some of which might be multifunction devices. For instance, NetDevices makes a gateway that supports VoIP and acts as a gateway to the traditional public phone network but doesn’t include PBX call features. A separate PBX or VoIP service would be needed.

In many cases branch offices are too small to warrant the capital cost of, say, a traffic-shaping appliance or a WAN-optimization platform, and certainly not both, Bartlett says. Adding just one more device can represent too large an operational cost as well. “It’s another thing, and it gets managed with yet another console, and it gets managed by people with a different set of expertise,” he says.

Linksys and Adtran make boxes with similar features but are not as manageable for large numbers of offices, Bartlett says.

The Converged Access BSG has a T-1 WAN link to connect directly to a WAN service and supports BGP and RIP routing protocols. It has a separate WAN Ethernet port to plug into a separate WAN router as well. It has separate FXS and FXO ports for analog phone failover.

Once supplied with an IP address to call home to, the devices can be shipped to remote offices and plugged in by nontechnical staff, and they will configure themselves via downloads from the CPS server.

The device can recognize more than 1,400 applications and apply appropriate priority to them by assigning one of five classes. The traffic-management system is patented, the company says, and includes advanced queuing, twin schedulers and rate shaping. The net result is the device manages inbound and outbound traffic and can assign proportional shares of available bandwidth even when available bandwidth drops. The company claims it can fill available pipes to 95%.

CPS automates some of the provisioning of BSG devices, the company says. For example, an administrator can instruct the system to provision a link to handle four voice calls requiring top priority, Citrix applications that require medium priority, and SAP applications that should receive something higher than best-effort that is given to e-mail.