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Nate
Asked: 2011-06-04 11:21:52 +0800 CST

What is a "VPN Consolidator"

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A client recently mentioned using a VPN consolidator for remote access to their server. I've never heard this term used before. Is it some type of slang that I'm not familiar with?

I did a bit of searching and I came up completely empty.

vpn

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Best guess: They used "VPN Consolidator" as a synonym for "VPN Concentrator". There is no hard'n'fast definition of a VPN concentrator either; it's generally just a device which is dedicated to being endpoint for (many) VPNs.

    Say you had a good DMZ & dual firewall setup that is working well, and you don't want to change it. A new need for a large'ish number of simultaneous VPN connections for 'road warriors' arises. Your existing firewalls aren't built for high-speed cryptography, they don't have a processing power to handle many AES streams at once.

    So you add a "VPN Concentrator" -- either a more modern firewall-style appliance with more CPU, or a full server -- and dedicate this box to handling the VPNs.

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