Retix Inc, the Santa Monica, California company best known for its Open Systems Interconnection software, is making its first foray into the Token Ring market with a couple of bridges and a proprietary MS-DOS-based network management station for monitoring and reconfiguring them. The 3660 is the cheaper of the two bridges and provides local linking between 4Mbps and 16Mbps Token Rings. The more expensive 3880 bridge device is for remote bridging, with the wide area connection running at speeds of up to 2.048Mbps. Retix’s open systems expertise does not extend to its bridging products. Both of the new offerings rely on proprietary protocols for management and configuration and can only be managed by its new 311 network management station. The good news is that the 311 contains an IBM NetView agent so that the manager can send information to central hosts via IBM’s LAN Manager – not to be confused with Microsoft LAN Manager. Nonetheless, presumably most users would prefer to be able to manage new bridges using existing tools, rather than having to add another box to their networks. One reason for the approach is that sources suggest that the company is buying the new bridges from Andrew Corp and therefore is not in complete control of the management protocol that is being used. However David Smith, associate vice-president of marketing in the US said that using a simple proprietary protocol was the expedient solution at the moment, but added that Retix should be producing bridges with either Simple Network Management Protocol or Common Management Interface Protocol within a year although getting SNMP to run over Token Ring is not a trivial task.
