Despite announcing that it was backing away from the router market last year (CI No 2,455), a statement the company now claims it never made (IBM Corp isn’t the only one to rewrite its history), Westborough, Massachusetts-based Proteon Inc has announced the RBX 250 multiprotocol router. The offering is targeted at district or regional offices r equiring communications back out to multiple remote site routers. It comes as standard with two local area network connections, enabling it to operate as a local-to-local network router, and four wide area network connections, enabling it to function as a routing concentrator, said the company. In terms of wide area network functions, it runs the company’s OpenRoute internetworking software packages for multiprotocol wide area network access capabilities, ranging from basic IP routing to multiprotocol routing and SNA communications, while the local area network capabilities of the router include network topology connections for Ethernet-to-Ethernet, Token Ring-to-Token Ring, and Ethernet-to-Token Ring. On the management side, it features Simple Network Management Protocol Management Information Bases for the appropriate interfaces and protocols, which can be managed via an Simple Network Management Protocol Management Information Base viewer or browser. The RBX also includes a console port for out-of-band man agement and can be accessed via Telnet, Proteon says. The company added that its four wide area network interfaces support RS232, V.35, X.21 and V.36/RS449 physical connections, and Peer-to-Peer Protocol, Proteon serial line, SDLC, X.25, V.25bis and Frame Relay data links. The product is planned to ship in November for $3,300, with the companion software packages ranging from $595 to $1,400.
