Cisco Announces New Unified VPN Suite; New Technologies for Layer 2 Access and Provisioning Across IP and MPLS networks

Business Wire, March 4, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 2002

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet announces its Unified VPN Suite, the industry's most complete set of Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN technologies, integrated across Cisco's core and access platform portfolio, supporting the largest common set of IP services, and provisioning capabilities. Cisco's Unified VPN Suite delivers new VPN technology for IP and MPLS backbone networks, increasing service providers' reach and revenues and enterprises' choices and flexibility. This comprehensive delivery includes new protocols such as Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol version 3 (L2TPv3), new deployment capabilities via Cisco Easy VPN and enhancements for integrating IPSec with MPLS. Complementing this are new VPN provisioning tools for both service provider and enterprises environments.

"Cisco's Unified VPN suite enables service providers to support both Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services across their IP or MPLS core," said Dave Passmore, Research Director, The Burton Group. "This will enable them to leverage their investment in an IP-based multi-service infrastructure."

"With Sprint's IP over DWDM backbone, L2TPv3 appears to offer a promising path to efficiently deliver Layer 2 services," said Barry Tishgart, Director -- Data Product Management. "Sprint is evaluating L2TPv3 technology and service attributes, and the demand for the services L2TPv3 enables."

Through support for a common suite of Cisco IOS(R) Software services, Cisco Unified VPN Suite allows service providers to offer customers a consistent set of advanced network services across their VPN networks including security, Quality-of-Service (QoS), NetFlow, SLAs via Cisco's Service Assurance Agent, and MPLS-based traffic engineering.

"Service providers want to take advantage of their IP or MPLS backbones while expanding their Layer 2 access revenues," said Sangeeta Anand, senior director of Product Marketing for Cisco's Internet Technologies Division. "Cisco's Unified VPN Suite enables them to expand their reach, introduce new IP service offerings, and cost effectively transport existing access traffic over their packet backbones."

Unified VPN Suite -- Protocols

Any Transport over MPLS (AToM)

Cisco's Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) solution allows transport of Layer 2 services across a MPLS core network. Cisco's AToM, based on the IETF `martini draft' (draft-martini-l2circuit-trans-mpls-08.txt)), allows the service provider to take full advantage of the inherent benefits of an MPLS backbone such as traffic engineering and bandwidth guarantees. Cisco's AToM delivery includes support for Layer 2 technology for Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS), ATM AAL5, ATM Cell Relay, Frame Relay, PPP, and HDLC over MPLS. Packet over SONET (PoS) will be available later.

Layer 2Tunneling Protocol, version 3 (L2TPv3)

To transport Layer 2 access over native IP backbones, Cisco has pioneered the new L2TPv3 protocol. It is based on optimized extensions to the underlying L2TP standard and includes signaling enhancements, a new encapsulation header, and a protocol identifier to support the end-to-end transportation of multiple Layer 2 protocols. Currently, an IETF draft (draft-ietf-l2tpext-l2tp-base-01), it incorporates support for Frame Relay, ATM, HDLC, PPP, and Ethernet. L2TPv3 can also provision transit tunnels across multiple MPLS and IP packet core networks.

IPSec VPNs

IPSec VPNs continue expansion in the enterprises for remote and peer-to-peer access. With this delivery, Cisco is adding IPSec to MPLS integration, which enables enterprise-sourced IPSec VPNs to be combined with an MPLS backbone.

Unified VPN Suite -- Provisioning

Cisco's VPN Solution Center (VPNSC) makes use of both Cisco products and third party solutions, such as WANDL, Concord NHM, and Visual Networks to provide service activation, monitoring, reporting, intrusion detection and policy management, for Frame Relay, ATM, PoS, PPP, HDLC, IPSec, and Ethernet VPNs. For Enterprises, the VPN Management System (VMS) will create Monitoring and Reporting, Intrusion Detection and Policy Management, for IPSec, but also for other Cisco IOS VPN technologies.

Cisco Easy VPN, a software enhancement based on Cisco's Unified Client Framework, provides a consistent connection and policy and key management method across Cisco's routers, security appliances and VPN clients. This feature allows users to deploy any Cisco Easy VPN-enabled device within a common VPN framework. For remote connections, Cisco Easy VPN enables Cisco routers and security appliances to automatically establish and maintain a VPN tunnel to a Cisco Easy VPN-enabled head-end device without complex remote configuration. For head-end applications, Cisco Easy VPN accepts incoming calls from remote Cisco Easy VPN-enabled devices and verifies that those connections have up-to-date policies in place before the connection is established. In addition, Cisco IOS-based head-ends can now terminate VPN connections from Cisco VPN software clients.