Santa Clara, California-based 3Com Corp has announced its commitment to support Novell Inc’s IPXWAN and NLSP NetWare Link Services Protocol routing technologies, the first fruit of a new partnership between the two companies to help customers integrate routers in NetWare enterprise networks. 3Com was participating in Novell’s multi-vendor interoperability demonstration of IPXWAN at the Interop ’93 trade show in San Francisco last week. The partnership was said by 3Com to be driven by customer demand for the ability to build large, scalable networks using the two vendor’s complementary remote router technologies. According to 3Com, Novell customers will now be able to choose 3Com routers for their network backbones and mix Novell Multi Protocol Routers and NETBuilder Remote routers at their branches, with a guarantee that their IPX traffic will be supported. IPXWAN is an extension to Novell’s IPX network protocol, designed to operate over multiple wide area network technologies including Point-to-Point Protocol, X.25, Frame Relay and ISDN. By implementing IPXWAN, 3Com says that NETBuilder routers will reliably communicate with Novell routers over the wide area. NetWare Link Services Protocol is a link-state routing protocol for internetworked environments. 3Com will deliver support of IPXWAN through a future release of NETBuilder software in the first half of 1994. According to independent research from the Gartner Group, Novell’s NLSP and IPXWAN routing protocols provide access to more than 30m NetWare nodes, representing over two thirds of all local area network nodes worldwide.
