Nortel's VPN switch family

Nigel Yap
New Straits Times
06-18-2001
Nortel's VPN switch family
Byline: Nigel Yap
Edition: Computimes; 2*
Section: Benchmark

AIMING to meet the needs of large corporations as well as small office- home office (SOHO) outfits, Nortel Networks Corp has introduced its Contivity family of virtual private network (VPN) switches. The new product range comprises models for enterprises and service providers.

The Contivity VPN switch is a single hardware device which provides routing, firewall, bandwidth management, encryption, authentication and data integrity for secure tunnelling across Internet protocol (IP) networks and the Internet.
Nortel's business development manager for Asia Jason Moore said enterprises could deploy Contivity VPN switches on their own or outsource deployment to a service provider which offer Contivity Managed Service.

"Either way, the Contivity VPN switches offer multi-location enterprises and some compelling service choices like extranet VPNs, intranet VPNs and remote access VPNs," he said.

Among the features consistent in the Contivity family are ease of deployment and management.

According to Moore, the Contivity switches are easy to deploy at any site, supports a wide range of interfaces and interoperates with existing network components like routers and firewalls.

He added that the Contivity family is able to integrate well with management system to provide VPN service management for fault management, performance management, accounting mediation, provisioning and creation, and monitoring of service level agreement.

Besides that, the VPN switches accept traffic through authenticated tunnelled connections. These connections are logged and encrypted for security using the most secure encryption standard.

Also, different user groups can have their unique filtering profile, with different access rights for group or branch offices with internal or external connections.

Products in the Contivity family also offer internal and external lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) capabilities.

The internal LDAP capability offers built-in space for storing profiles, and additional capacity can be purchased in the form of the external LDAP option which allows the Contivity switches to store more than 10,000 LDAP user and group profiles.

The switches can also be integrated with a Contivity Stateful Firewall. All connections can be authenticated, encrypted and further protected by filtering profiles for each user group, according to Nortel.

In the Contivity family, there are six models - the Contivity 100, Contivity 400, Contivity 600, Contivity 1600, Contivity 2600 and Contivity 4500.

The Contivity 100 can support up to five tunnels and provides basic branch connectivity for SOHO outfits requiring a limited number of branch tunnels while the Contivity 400 is able to support up to 30 tunnels.

On the other hand, the Contivity 600 is designed to give small branch offices and enterprises the flexibility of up to 300 VPN tunnels in both remote access and branch office settings.

Another model, the Contivity 1600, offers flexible solutions for office centres, campuses or branch offices and can support up to 200 tunnels.

As for the Contivity 2600, it provides full-featured performance and security for locations which require up to 1,000 tunnels.

And finally the Contivity 4500, which is the premium model and able to support up to 5,000 tunnels and provides secure and efficient VPN connectivity.

nigelytl@itp.nstp.com.my

Illustrations/Photos:
Caption: The Contivity family: In the line up are (from left) the
Contivity 1600, Contivity 600 and Contivity 4500.

(Copyright 2001)