Cisco Announces New Unified VPN Suite

March 4, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Cisco Systems, Inc. (cisco.com), a worldwide leader in Internet networking technology, announced on Monday the release of its Unified VPN Suite, which it calls the industry’s most complete set of Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN technologies, integrated across Cisco’s core access platform portfolio, supporting the largest common set of IP services and provisioning capabilities.

The Unified VPN Suite, says Cisco, includes new VPN technology for IP and MPLS backbone networks, increasing reach and revenues for service providers, and choice and flexibility for enterprises.

The delivery includes new protocols like Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol version 3, new deployment capabilities through Cisco Easy VPN and enhancements for integrating IPSec with MPLS. Included in the release are new VPN provisioning tools for both service providers and enterprises.

"Service providers want to take advantage of their IP or MPLS backbones while expanding their Layer 2 access revenues," says 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."

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

The Unified VPN Suite is available in the Cisco IOS Software releases 12.0S and 12.2T for platforms ranging from Cisco 800 access routers to Cisco 12000 Internet routers.