Phoenix, Arizona-based Hypercom Network Systems has announced a new gateway designed to enable users to migrate to TCP/IP-host centric environments, while protecting their investment in legacy systems. Rather than encapsulating the legacy traffic in TCP/IP headers, the Legacy/TCP/IP Gateway, used in the company’s Integrated Enterprise Network hybrid router product line, provides native support for both legacy protocols and TCP/IP interfaces. The advantage of this, HyperCom claims, is that the legacy interface operates without any changes in configuration or operation, and that encapsulation headers or trailers, or other modifications to the user data, are not required. On the TCP/IP side, the gateway also operates in a native fashion to provide the highest level of throughput, says the company. Each separate legacy directly corresponds to a TCP/IP session, allowing for a simple programming interface within the Internet Protocol environment. As the gateway establishes Transmission Control Protocol sessions for transmitting legacy protocols to a set of TCP/IP hosts, it distributes these sessions across the enterprise network. This, says Hypercom, prevents any one wide area network connection from being overloaded. Each legacy connection gets its own session, which also preserves data quality, and makes it easy to isolate and obtain diagnostics on multiple protocols as they traverse the network. Along with individual sessions, the associated management traffic is also distributed. No price or availability details were given by the company.
