What's the latest on VPN IP compression equipment?

[Alan_152]

Here's the deal: there is a DS-3 45Mb/s cloud running between my lab in Colorado and another lab in Texas. For one of our test programs, we plan to run a VPN across this connection at 30Mb/s. So far so good.

However, the project manager says he will occasionally need more than 30Mb/s. Unfortunately, other traffic also uses that DS-3, and we can't take much more bandwidth away from that. I've been asked to research into current hardware methods of compressing the IP traffic across the VPN -- we've heard that we can get up to a virtual 4x increase in bandwidth at the cost of some processing latency.

Getting additional lines into the labs is out of the question, due to the short-term nature of the tests.

I've done some initial research, but it seems that all Google spits out are companies that have long since been eaten up by others or have gone out of business.

So, what does the gallery recommend in terms of late-model compression equipment?

[GhostDog · Accepted solution]

Hi, Alan.
If it can help you - cisco ASA or routers are able to do LZS compression of ipsec payload. But 4x compression IMHO is an overkill. Depending on data type you can gain about 30-200% compression in average.

[Alan_152]

On this basis, we've decided to go with a Cisco 2600 with IOS upgrade to handle software LZS compression, plus a VPN adapter. Thanks!

[Alan_152]

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