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 Richter Systems Builds Own Internet-Based WAN | ||||
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By Kelly Jackson Higgins Not everyone has outsourcing fever these days. Take business software developer Richter Systems International, which built its own VPN (virtual private network) to connect three of its major sites worldwide. The company, which develops client-server- based applications for retailers and manufacturers, needed to link those sites for its software-development operations. Richter needed Internet access, too, so it made sense to roll its WAN into the Internet. "You have to pay for the Internet, so why not encapsulate the cost of a [WAN] into the cost for T1 on the Internet," says Robert Masse, information security engineer for Richter and a member of the networking team that built Richter's VPN. The company passed up a frame relay service for its WAN in favor of a homegrown, T1-speed IP VPN because it was less expensive in the long run. The numbers speak for themselves: A 512-Kbps frame relay line with a CIR (committed information rate) of 128 Kbps would have cost Richter $5,000 a month, versus its T1 Internet connection, which costs about $3,000 a month. "We wanted to make use of the network backbone already in existence," says Dawn Bonsor, director of MIS at Richter, which has grown from less than 100 employees three years ago to more than 400 employees today. Using the VPN, Richter's application developers in The Netherlands now work virtually with developers at the Montreal headquarters on the company's main Oracle database machines there. This is especially crucial for version control of the code. "The European developers write some code locally, then synchronize the Montreal databases" with the code, Masse says. That's a far cry from the dial-up ISDN connection Richter's overseas developers used to rely on. VPN services were scarce and pricey last year when Richter decided to go VPN, so the company built a VPN out of Check Point Software Technologies' FireWall-1 software running on a Compaq Computer Corp. ProLiant server and T1-speed Internet connections from Netcom and WorldCom. Each of Richter's main sites--in Montreal, San Francisco and Maarssen, Holland--host a FireWall-1 box with T1 links and backup ISDN connections. Other sites reach the VPN via a Sprint frame relay connection. For the company's Atlanta executive offices, Bonsor and her team went with a dedicated frame relay connection--traffic from Atlanta goes through Montreal to the VPN. There's a catch with running your own VPN, however. You can't just call your ISP when something goes wrong. When one of Richter's main VPN nodes blew a system board recently, temporarily shutting down the VPN, it was the network team's job to get it back up and running.
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