Oct, 2001 : Ardent Announces VPN Based on MPLS Tunneling

📅 October 3, 2001 - Ardent Communications, Inc. (ardentcomm.com), a provider ofbroadband access and bundled data services, announced the generalavailability of its new suite of Virtual Private Networking products.

With the launch of its flagship MPLS-VPN product, Ardent becomes one of thefirst service providers to offer its customers the benefits of MultiProtocol Label Switching in a corporate VPN. Designed to connect andsecurely transfer data between two or more high-bandwidth sites (fractionalT1 or above) through a high speed, secure virtual IP tunnel, Ardent's newMPLS-VPN delivers a true point-to-point Virtual Private Network. UsingResource Reservation Setup Protocol (RSVP), a routing protocol that createsdedicated bandwidth tunnels through an IP network, Ardent also offers itsMPLS-VPN customers with an option to have a dedicated bandwidthpoint-to-point connection between sites in addition to the MPLS-VPNsecurity.
Ardent has also announced the launch of an encrypted VPN solution, calledE-VPN, for sites using Digital Subscriber Lines. Using industry standard,highly secure IPSEC protocols with 3DES encryption, Ardent's integratedE-VPN solution encrypts data at the customer edge for secure transmissionover the Ardent network. Ardent also offers the E-VPN solution for T-1sites.
With Ardent's E-VPN solution, businesses can also connect a remote DSL siteto a core MPLS-VPN network. In such a configuration, VPN connections betweenhigh-bandwidth sites and remote DSL sites will use the company's E-VPNencrypted solution (IPSEC 3DES) while connections between T1 sites will useArdent's advanced broadband MPLS-VPN solution.
"As business applications grow, so do corporate requirements for innovativesolutions for secure, high quality data transmission between sites," saidMichael J. Abbott, CTO for Ardent Communications. "Our two new VPN offeringsaddress many of the business needs that our corporate and governmentcustomers have been requesting. Complimenting our encrypted VPN solution forDSL customers, Ardent is breaking new ground with our MPLS-based VPN solution, the industry's first product to use this next generationIP routing protocol."
By virtue of Ardent's next generation network and MPLS routing, Ardent'sMPLS-VPN provides the customer with both point-to-point multi-siteconnectivity and Internet access over the same broadband connection,dramatically reducing the customer's monthly recurring access costs. Incases where a customer wants to restrict Internet access for remote sites,Ardent can customize a point-to-point VPN solution that limits datacommunications to only between specified VPN locations.
In addition, as a managed service, Ardent ships the customer a preconfiguredrouter, which is installed in the network. Ardent's technical support teamthen provisions and monitors the VPN service (E-VPN and MPLS- VPN),configuring the tunnel from the customer's edge router, through the Ardentnetwork, to the destination router.
MPLS technology is a next-generation routing protocol that provides advancedtraffic capabilities between two or more sites. The technology significantlyspeeds the routing process by sending IP traffic through a network in themost efficient way possible. With Ardent's MPLS-VPN solution, leveraging thefull functionality of Ardent's 100 percent MPLS-enabled national IP network,Ardent offers the business customer improved network management, increasedsecurity, and a significantly higher Quality of Service than that providedby traditional encrypted VPN solutions.
With Ardent's MPLS VPN solution, each IP packet is encapsulated and assigneda label by an edge router. The encapsulated packet is then transported tothe destination site through a virtual tunnel over the Ardent network. Therouters in the network transfer the packet based on the MPLS label, neverbreaking the encapsulation of the secured data.
To the Ardent network, the data traveling over an MPLS-VPN is virtuallyinvisible, with no chance of outside interception. Traffic between sitestravels through a virtual IP tunnel, and can never be diverted, providingthe customer with high data security, exceptional network performance andlow latency.
Additionally, as customer data is encapsulated and tunneled through Ardent'snetwork, from CPE to CPE, the need for encryption is eliminated. By usinglabel forwarding and virtual IP tunneling instead of VPN encryption's "besteffort" data transmission, the MPLS-VPN product offers significantlysuperior traffic performance over an encrypted VPN solution.
Ardent Communications' fully managed encrypted E-VPN solution is offered forsecure data connectivity between DSL and T1 sites and DSL to DSL sites.Using industry standard IPSEC and 3DES encryption, each DSL VPN site cansupport up to 15 simultaneous VPN tunnels and each T1 and above VPN site cansupport up to 100 simultaneous tunnels. The solution supports ESP and AHdata encapsulation, two key technologies for data security.