* Equant offers LAN VPN, a managed service down to the workgroup switch
Equant is offering a managed LAN service that blends in with its VPN service to better assure service quality from desktop to desktop.
The service provider already offers its Adaptive VPN service, a managed router service using Cisco gear that supports site-to-site VPNs.
The new service, called LAN VPN, is a managed service down to the workgroup switch. At the moment, the switches must be made by Cisco, but later this year Equant will expand the service to include Nortel switches.
The service takes the responsibility for LAN management off of businesses and sees to it that LAN service quality markers such as Differentiated Services are mapped correctly to Equant’s MPLS WAN QoS markers.
Businesses could manage their own LANs and buy a WAN IP VPN service. Equant’s pitch is that having one service staff handling both LAN and WAN gear makes the end-to-end set up with QoS more assured – something that might be very important to certain applications and to VoIP.
Equant charges by the port being managed, and that falls within the range of $5 to $15, depending on service-level agreements, the country where the sites are and how much site support is needed.
Equant says it offers a Web interface that lets customers monitor their networks and later in the year will enable them to ping the network between specific switches to find out how well routes are performing.
While LAN VPN isn’t a VPN all by itself, for those companies that have already embraced outsourcing, it is a way to trim back their IT burden so they can focus on applications and business processes instead of the network.
