Press Release

Data Connection Releases Full Support for RFC 2547 BGP/MPLS VPNs

Data Connection's increasing investment in IP Routing protocols adds RFC 2547 VPNs to their acclaimed suite of IP Routing and MPLS products

London, UK: February 3, 2003. Data Connection Limited (DCL), the world's leading provider of communications protocol software, today announced immediate availability of its BGP/MPLS VPN management product, DC-VPN Manager. DC-VPN Manager is a fully portable, source code solution that coordinates the provision of BGP/MPLS VPNs. It forms part of DCL's carrier-class IP Routing Suite, which was developed in close cooperation with major customers and carriers to meet their stringent requirements for reliability, scalability and extensibility.

"With the addition of DC-VPN Manager to our product range, OEMs now have a stable source for high-quality MPLS, BGP and RFC 2547 VPN control plane software," said Ben Miller, VP Sales and Marketing of Data Connection's Networking Protocols Group. "Our strong financial position and our continual investment in IP routing protocols, when many protocol suppliers are reducing headcount and searching for additional funding, are a huge relief for OEMs looking for core protocol technology."

BGP/MPLS VPNs give Network Providers a managed IP VPN solution that builds on their existing BGP and MPLS investments. Through this technology, they can increase the value that they provide to their corporate customers with secure inter-site links and guaranteed QoS.

ADC-VPN Manager can be supplied pre-integrated with DC-MPLS and DC-BGP to provide a complete BGP/MPLS (RFC 2547) VPN control plane and reduced development effort. Alternatively, it can be used to upgrade existing BGP and MPLS implementations through well-architected open interfaces.

• It supports tens of thousands of VPN Routing and Forwarding (VRF) Tables per Provider Edge (PE) router, and provides an intelligent and efficient solution for maintaining private per-VPN routing information alongside shared internet routes.
• It provides a simple, consistent management model for configuration of VPNs and VRFs.
• It is loosely coupled to BGP and MPLS to enable flexible distribution of function over multiple processor cards.
• It provides non-stop forwarding and fault tolerance with no single point of failure in highly available environments.

Further information on Data Connection's IP Routing products, including DC-VPN Manager, can be found at www.dataconnection.com/iprouting.

DC-VPN Manager runs within DCL's existing high performance portable execution environment - the N-BASE. This provides extensive scalability and flexibility and enables the distribution of protocol components across different hardware configurations. The N-BASE has been ported to a large number of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, pSOS, Chorus, Nucleus, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT, and has been used on all common processors including x86, i960, Motorola 860 and 8260, Sparc, IDT and MIPS. Proprietary OSs and chipsets can be supported with minimal effort. In addition, pre-ported solutions are available on a range of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, Linux, LynxOS, Solaris and Windows.

About Data Connection Limited

Data Connection Limited (DCL) is the leading independent developer and supplier of IP Routing, LMP, MPLS, SIP, MGCP/Megaco, SCTP, ATM, Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Directory and SNA portable products. Customers include Calient, CIENA, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM Corp., Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, and Sun. Its MetaSwitch division develops and manufactures a carrier-class Next Generation Class 5 Switch for telecommunications service providers.

Data Connection is headquartered in London UK, with US offices in Reston, VA and Alameda, CA. It was founded in 1981 and is privately held. During each of the past 20 years its profits have exceeded 20% of revenue. Last year sales exceeded $35M, of which 90% were outside the UK, mostly in the US. This large proportion of overseas sales has led to the company being awarded two Queen's Awards for outstanding export performance.

For more information, see www.dataconnection.com.

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