* Routers help with migration to AES
Cisco has seen its hefty branch-office router share chipped away at over the past few years, in part by some niche low-end access players competing on price and in part by networking heavyweights. The company’s recently announced Integrated Services Routers, described last time, are an attempt to keep those competitors at bay, at least temporarily.
Cisco’s ISR story is one of integration, simplification and wire-speed performance in the branch. Encryption acceleration is embedded directly into a processor on the motherboard, and optional voice processor modules also fit into motherboard slots (similar in form factor to adding memory to your PC).
Competition-wise, Juniper, with its recently announced J-series enterprise WAN access routers and its acquisition of NetScreen, has perhaps the best competing integrated security story to tell. Nortel would seem to have the greatest voice-integration strengths on which to compete.
3Com (with partner Huawei) last week also announced some enterprise-class routers that have been deemed baseline-interoperable with Cisco (and Juniper) gear by The Tolly Group.
But 3Com’s 3000 and 6000 families don’t seem to deliver anything unique from a feature or performance perspective, with the possible exception of MPLS support. This feature, though, appears to be support for MPLS tagging (a QoS marking feature), as opposed to support for an MPLS user-network interface.
The latter would be more interesting from an enterprise future-proofing standpoint, because it would be useful once self-provisioning capabilities become available with IP VPN services.
Meanwhile, smaller vendors such as AdTran often compete on price where basic routing features are required but enterprise budgets are tighter. AdTran announced last month a new WAN access router platform, the NetVanta 4000 series, along with a version of its operating system that supports Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Triple-DES.
Likewise, the encryption acceleration processor on the Cisco’s ISR motherboard works with Cisco IOS Software to supports AES, Triple-DES and/or DES.
The multimode encryption support from both vendors enables enterprises to migrate to AES, now specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as the Federal Information Processing Standard for encryption.
This is helpful; many Cisco head-end devices also support all three types, for example, so you can run the algorithm already installed in your various locations, then upgrade remote-site “spokes” to AES as you can afford to.
