When Martin Taylor, of Madge Networks Ltd forecast that we should expect new entrants into the Token Ring market using the new National Semiconductor Corp-fabricated, IBM-licensed chip sets, he wasn’t wrong. Last month’s contender was 3Com Corp which splashed out with around a dozen new products including Token Ring adaptor boards. 3Com’s previous foray into Token Ring was not a great success: the company’s own estimate is that it captured between 3% and 4% of the market in 1986 with products based around the original Texas Instruments Inc chip set.
Badly-behaved
The company says the failure to make a bigger impact was due to incompatibilities in the Texas set. Badly-behaved applications trying to write directly to registers on the IBM adaptors failed to find them. As a result, some Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking software and 3270 emulators came to a grinding halt. Consequently, 3Com got caught up in the irksome business of re-writing drivers and living on tenterhooks lest IBM made another change to its silicon. But where we really lost ground was when IBM announced 16Mbps Token Ring and Texas Instruments was late by about a year-and-a-half says Bill Swift, US product marketing manager for the network adaptor division. At this point we decided to re-invest our money in Ethernet, and since then we have been biding our time. The introduction of the IBM-designed silicon has ended the waiting period, but 3Com’s lack of control over the chips shows up in when comparing the capabilities of the new TokenLink III boards with those of the EtherLink III boards announced three weeks ago. There’s no sign of any parallel networking architecture in the TokenLinks, nor is there likely to be since that would require either a re-engineering of the NatSemi chip set or the addition either of extra support chips or specialised drivers. Any of these would remove that all-important 100%-IBM compatible label. 3Com covets this to such a degree that it is not even shipping drivers for its boards, saying that users can rely on IBM’s offerings. The only problem with sticking so closely to IBM specs is how to differentiate oneself in the market. Among 3Com’s ploys are an RJ45 unshielded twisted pair connector built directly on to the board and formal support for 300 foot station distances for 16Mbs Token Ring over unshielded twisted pair, something that IBM is still shying away from. The AT bus adaptor costs UKP550, the 32-bit EISA and 16-bit Micro Channel boards will be available from this month for UKP755 and UKP550 respectively. The company professes an interest in Cisco Systems Inc’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Internetworking plan, but it has no immediate plans to join the consortium. Given that 3Com, along with Novell Inc and Network Equipment Technologies Inc, got its hands on IBM’s APPN code early on, that is not particularly surprising.
By Chris Rose
In fact, the company reports that it has APPN running successfully on its Netbuilder 2 and that this will be demonstrated in the next few months. Netbuilder 2 has a number of new features with Token Ring functions like source routing, multiprotocol routing and LL2 tunnelling; and the ability to encapsulate Token Ring frames inside TCP/IP packets for delivery across an Internet Protocol network. Also added are extra wide area network interfaces and Kilostream users get an RS-449 connection – akin to X21 – while for Megastream, there is a new G.703 port. 3Com reckons that its Linkbuilder range of stackable hubs launched earlier this year has proved particularly successful, with around 800 units shipping in the first five months, according to product marketing manager Nigel Oakley, and the product has been tweaked with the launch of the Linkbuilder Flexible Media Stack. Other new features include the ability to slot management boards into the modules as and when required, instead of having to buy specific management modules. The range of media supported has been extended to include coaxial and thin Ethernet, costing UKP1,500 and UKP800, with a fibre hub following in early 1993. The mana
gement board, which costs UKP675 is available immediately and is the first 3Com product to feature its new ‘smart’ management agent – a common system that will gradually appear across the 3Com range. The Linkbuilder FMS software can be upgraded via a software download to incorporate future enhancements such as secure Simple Network Management Protocol. Right at the bottom of the hub heap is the EtherLink TP, 3Com’s new hub adaptor – a board that fits into a basic personal computer and turns it into a 12-port device. No – you don’t have 12 10Base-T connections squeezed into the back of a computer, instead, a single cable connects the board to a harmonica – a narrow box that has 12 sockets mounted in a row.
Piggyback
The device, which is compatible with Novell’s Hub Management Interface, is aimed at small workgroups, although a piggy-back Hubcard which adds an extra 12 ports is available, and up to three Hubcards can be added to a Hub Adaptor. The Etherlink TP adaptor costs UKP550 and it will be available this month. Each expansion hub board will cost $480. Add-on media boards are provided for direct hub connections to thin coax or fibre, and connection to thick coax is provided through an AUI connection. Among the new features in IsoView 4.0 is, according to 3Com, the first commercial implementation of Secure SNMP and that will be ready for the SMP Simple Management Protocol if and when it finally arrives. One of the other features of which the company is especially proud is a Management Information Base manager, said to be substantially friendlier than a standard Management Information Base browser, and presenting the Base in such a way to make editing, if not easy, then at least simpler. Among the other new features: the software can now cope with up to 64,000 devices, theoretically at least, improved statistics and event management, including the ability to invoke alarm-triggered applications. The IsoView kernel is UKP2,250; local bridge and repeater options cost an extra UKP1,500 while the SNMP management option and SNMP gateway are UKP2,000 each.
