News
NSTL Tests Windows 2000 VPN
- By Scott Bekker
- March 01, 2000
Microsoft Corp. today announced that National Software Testing Laboratory Inc. (NSTL) testing demonstrated that Windows 2000 can support both 5,000 simultaneous point-to-point tunneling protocol (PPTP) and 5,000 simultaneous layer two tunneling protocol (L2TP/IPSec) virtual private networking (VPN) connections.
The NSTL (www.nstl.com) tests were done on a four-processor Intel Xeon 550MHz system with 1 GB of RAM, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Intel Pro/100 S Server adapters for IPSec encryption offload.
Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) claims these numbers are two to five times the number of tunnels than other server-based VPNs at this level of performance.
According to the testing, the server-based Microsoft Windows 2000 VPN costs as low as $5 per connection.
"NSTL proves that Windows 2000 Advanced Server can deliver scalability without compromising on price or performance," said Deborah Willingham, vice president of Windows Marketing at Microsoft in a statement.
Results also show site-to-site performance as high as 70 Mbps using L2TP/IPSec protocol.
For remote-access connections, the tests showed that such a system can support 5,000 simultaneous users at typical remote-access loads through 56Kbps links. Details regarding the NSTL testing can be found at www.microsoft.com/windows2000/library/howitworks/communications/remoteaccess/vpnperf.asp
The Windows 2000 Server operating system includes a VPN gateway, authentication, and policy management and deployment tools out of the box. Reporting, accounting and trend analysis from Telco Research Corp. (www.telcoresearch.com) is also included as part of the resource kit. – Thomas Sullivan
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.