Alcatel (NYSE: ALA) announced the first product in a new family of security appliances. The Alcatel OmniAccess 210 is a descendent of the TimeStep 7100 Series.
The Alcatel OmniAccess 210 hardware uses an IPSec VPN for branch office access.
"IP VPNs are attractive for their low cost, ubiquity, and the flexibility they provide in ad hoc connectivity," according to IDC analyst Jason Smolek.
Features of the new product include IPsec tunneling, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, Message Digest 5 (MD5) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) hashing, Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and RSA digital signatures, Data Encryption Standard (DES and 3DES), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms. It supports shared secret, RADIUS, LDAP, X.509 PKI certificates and smart cards.
"PKI support from other vendors is an afterthought, but with Alcatel it is a central part of their gear," said David Divins, senior network engineer, ServerVault.
The OmniAccess 210 delivers 12Mbps 3DES and 40 Mbps AES performance while supporting 500 concurrent tunnels.
It has SSL web-based configuration. For command line interface (CLI) configuration, Secure Shell (SSH) is supported. SNMP provides for device monitoring, including events/alarms, utilization and status.
The OmniAccess 210 will be available in April 2002. Pricing starts at $3,995. Additional software and hardware models will be rolled out later this year.
