2/2/98 CommunicationsWeek 1 (see BOLD)
1998 WL 2379978
InternetWeek
Copyright 1998 CMP Publications Inc.
Monday, February 2, 1998
700
News & Analysis
VPNs, Warts And All
--
Roundtable participants note shortcomings of nascent IP technology, but
benefits sustain user interest
Salvatore Salamone
Washington, D.C. -- a VPN might be a godsend for your remote users and
the cor-porate backbone. But for service providers, it's just another in
a growing list of IP services.
That's not scaring off users, who can make a compelling business case
for virtual private networks. But these early adopters face significant
problems.
They lack turnkey providers for services, equipment and
administration. Plus, so-called performance guarantees cover nothing
more than network availability. For latency, end-to-end performance or
guaranteed response times, you're on your own.
Those were two of the primary conclusions drawn, ironically, by
leading equipment and service providers convened by Internet-Week for a
VPN roundtable here last week.
"For the next five years, complex corporate data will not rely solely
on public IP networks," said Bob Smith, senior marketing manager for
MCI's Internet products and services.
"You'll see hybrid networks that combine existing access
[technologies] with VPNs," said Denise Grey, managing director of AT&T's
Global Business IP Services.
What needs to be done before IT managers will go hog-wild for VPNs is
for the service providers to address performance issues and provide more
help in administering these networks.
For instance, most roundtable participants agreed that no single
vendor or service provider can supply the combination of equipment,
services, support and management tools that corporations would like to
get.
"We end up marrying a company with a carrier," said Thomas Pincince,
founder of New Oak Communications Inc., which last week became part of
Bay Networks' extranet access division.
Users contacted after the roundtable validated the views of the
roundtable participants.
"We've decided to cobble together something ourselves that lets us
link sites over a VPN," said Andrew Milner, a network administrator at
Gendall Pharmaceutical Supplies Corp., a medical supplies distributor.
Milner took advantage of a software upgrade from his router vendor, whom
he would not name, that included support for VPNs to link five regional
centers. He linked the sites over existing T1 Internet access lines.
Milner and other users said they would have considered VPNs from a
service provider, but there were too many pieces missing. "There is
often no incentive to buy anything but access from an ISP," said Raymond
Lopez, an independent remote access consultant. He notes that most ISPs
offer services like 7-day by 24-hour support and management of the
equipment on a user's site for their access services, and very little
beyond that for VPN services.
"Every large customer wants service level agreements," said MCI's
Smith. And they want to know "what we are doing to improve them," he
said.
The VPN services announced to date by the major backbone service
providers all include SLAs that offer either service credits or refunds
if the network is down more than a certain number of minutes per day.
However, none of the SLAs offer end-to-end latency guarantees
(InternetWeek, Dec. 15, 1997). There are a number of reasons for this.
For instance, end-to-end VPN performance depends in part on client
performance.
However, there are areas where service providers can step up and help
improve the performance of some VPN applications.
For instance, providers "can deploy technology that lets them control
latency and congestion," said Robert Redford, director of service
provider marketing at Cisco. He noted, for example, that an ISP could
use quality-of-service (QoS) features in routers and switches to give
VPN traffic higher priority as it passes over a network.
However, even as most of the national Internet backbone operators are
moving to higher speed networks and incorporating QoS features, there is
a major performance limitation that will prevent latency-related SLAs
from being available in the foreseeable future.
ISPs have no control over performance once traffic crosses from one
provider's backbone to another. "Once you get to a NAP [Network Access
Point], pray," said Timothy Kraskey, vice president of marketing in
Ascend's core systems division.
The service providers present at the roundtable did not believe there
would be any relief in this area anytime soon. "What's the motivation
for carriers to offer QoS relationships" between each other's networks,
Smith asked.
"The incentive will have to be financial," said Pushpendra Mohta,
executive vice president of TCG CERFnet, whose parent, Teleport
Communications Group Inc., is being acquired by AT&T. He noted that for
years telcos have been able to handle the issues of compensating each
other for handling traffic, but a similar system does not exist for
ISPs.
It all comes down to settlement agreements, according to Gregg
Lebovitz, service line manager of GTE's managed security services. "Look
at cellular," he said, noting that that industry has worked out
agreements on how to handle billing for carrying traffic between
networks.
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