On October 7-8^th, Dave Piscitello and I made our annual trek to New York City to drop in on Fall Internet World.

Dave and I presented an overview of Virtual Private Networking in a half-day TCP/IP PING Workshop on October 7^th. In this session, we defined Virtual Private Networking (VPN), described applications for remote dial access, intranets, and extranets, identified economic drivers that motivate deployment, and illustrated where VPN products fit within enterprise networks.  We used products that we’d reviewed in Internet World and Computerworld -- Extended Systems’ ExtendNet VPN, Compatible Systems’ Intraport2+, and Aventail’s VPN Server -- to illustrate VPN protocols like PPTP, IPsec, and SOCKS/SSL. To download a copy of our workshop presentation, click here. We’ll be repeating this workshop in the future; if you’d like to hear more about CoreCom plans, let us know.

At the show, we also scoured the exhibit floor for new and interesting products. Here are a few of the products that caught my attention at FIW98.

• Radware/RND’s FireProof is the first product I’ve seen focus on outbound load balancing – distributing traffic intelligently across firewalls or security gateways. L4 switches do a great job of redirecting traffic to destinations on the same LAN and are often used to balance inbound traffic across application and web servers. Routers can be statically configured to distribute outbound packets across alternate routes. In contrast, the FireProof balances all outbound application streams in a dynamic fashion, reacting to changes in overall network performance while keeping related packets together to avoid interfering with SOCKS firewall traversal and IPSEC tunnels.

• RADGUARD’s cIPro-VPN appears to be comparatively mature entry in the rapidly expanding IPSEC market. This 10/100 Mbps dual-Ethernet custom processor was among the first wave of IPSEC products certified by ICSA; its unique features include physical token authentication, an integrated Certificate Authority (cIPro-CA), and support for hot-standby redundancy. We’re planning to conduct a combined lab evaluation of the cIPro-VPN and FireProof for a future issue of Internet World, so stay tuned.

• Xedia’s Access Point QVPN promises to be an innovative "all in one" solution for routing, bandwidth management, and virtual private networking. During the past year, a new wave of multi-function products have emerged, but Xedia’s entry appears to be leading-edge – I haven’t seen any other product that bundles OSF, BGP, CBQ, Diff-Serv, and IPSEC into a single box. CoreCom reviewed Xedia's Access Port 100 bandwidth manager in the February '98 issue of InfoWorld; we’re look forward to seeing the new QVPN in action.

• On the remote access front, I found myself newly intrigued by a product that’s been around awhile – Hughes Networks’ DirecPC. This product offers 400 Kbps downstream (burstable as high as 1 Mbps) over satellite transmission. With a new USB modem and Internet access packages that now start at $29.99 for 25 hours per month, DirecPC sounds like a better deal than comparably-priced ISDN Internet access, and perhaps even competitive with entry-level xDSL. I’m hoping to get a peek at Elk River Softworx’s SatServ – a Windows 95/98 router/firewall product that can reportedly be combined with DirecPC to create a small business LAN Internet access solution.

These are just a few of the hundreds (thousands?) of products exhibited at Internet World. This isn’t a big iron show, and I spent my precious free time checking out whatever network infrastructure I could find. However, if you’re into all things web and Java, Internet World is the place for you! I just can’t tell you anything about it – I didn’t stop at those booths…

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