VPN vendors working to make gear compatible

Expect to see VPN gear enter a new phase later this year: interoperability.

At the moment customers are forced to buy VPN equipment from one vendor if they want it to work. Ongoing informal interoperability plug fests will change this. Individual VPN customers will have a choice of vendors to buy from.

But an even greater benefit is that customers will be able to set up VPNs more easily with their business partners. Today, you have to work to make sure your VPN gear and their VPN gear are able to talk to each other before you can set up secure IP links with your partners. This holds true even if all the vendors are building equipment to the same standards. Different implementations of the same standard can result in incompatible gear.

VPN equipment makers are choosing select partners to interoperate with, but they are also entering broader compatibility trials.

For example, the California Broadband Users Group (CalBUG) recently drew 60 vendors to a plug fest in Santa Barbara, and plans a second one later this year. The focus was on interoperability of features of PPP, Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, which is based on PPP; and IP Security, which includes a number of underlying standards.

The tests are informal, and the results are secret, but they give engineers from competing companies a place to iron out incompatibility issues. It also gives them deadlines to meet for working out glitches that block interoperability.

"It's like a big junior high school dance where you get a lot of people in a room and it's up them to pair up," says Bob Larribeau, director of CalBUG.

CalBUG's Web site is at www.ciug.org.

Tim Greene is a senior editor at Network World, covering virtual private networking gear, remote access, core switching and local phone companies. You can reach him at tgreene@nww.com.

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