Peribit updates compression gear

Peribit has customized its point-to-point compression gear to help customers make IP Security VPN connections faster and more stable.

Peribit has customized its point-to-point compression gear to help customers make IP Security VPN connections faster and more stable.

Version 3.1 of SRS software for its SR-20, SR-50 and SR-55 appliances can give VPN traffic better priority across congested Internet links and let VPN boxes operate more efficiently, Peribit says.

Peribit’s devices can limit the speed at which traffic is received at a VPN site to reduce contention for bandwidth that VPN traffic faces. Traffic can be prioritized in this way into four classes: VPN traffic, traffic from VPN sites where there is no Peribit box, other TCP traffic and non-TCP Internet traffic.

Law firm Fenwick & West in Mountain View, Calif., has three Peribit boxes at its three corporate sites and is considering putting in four more to accommodate VPN users working from home. As telecommuting in the firm has increased from 60 to about 250 people in the past year, the bandwidth to the Cisco VPN concentrator has become taxed, says Matt Kesner, CTO for the firm.

Remote-access lawyers use high-bandwidth legal applications, so Kesner plans to target the heaviest bandwidth consumers for the home Peribit units. VPN congestion has resulted in attorneys losing work at the last minute. “If three or four hours of a lawyer’s time is lost, that’s pretty compelling,” he says.

In addition, the law firm provides voice-over-IP capabilities to some telecommuters over their Internet connections. The Peribit boxes will improve these links enough to keep delay low and voice quality acceptable, Kesner says.

To take advantage of the VPN features, Peribit devices are deployed at VPN sites between the LAN and the VPN gateway, where they compress traffic by replacing repetitive patterns in the data with shorter sequences. This reduces the volume of traffic the VPN box has to encrypt.

SRS in earlier releases also formatted compressed packets to be short enough that the VPN device didn’t have to fragment them into smaller packets, again saving processing power on the VPN gear. The devices also could control bandwidth allotted to different types of traffic that they were compressing, but that traffic still had to contend with other Internet traffic for bandwidth.

Peribit says this can improve the performance of Internet links for VPNs so much that fewer VPN sessions get dropped.

Peribit competitors Expand Networks and ITWorx make no such claims.