IBM Corp has announced LAN Server Ultimedia to enable continued maintainenance of multimedia delivery quality as more clients are added to the local network, without bandwidth overload. It supports Windows, MS-DOS and OS/2 multimedia clients, and Ethernet and Token Ring local networks. It is transparent to the variety of multimedia data types and applications used, and manages the ratio of multimedia versus traditional data at the server, IBM says. It enables management of local network bandwidth so that the multimedia service does not exceed the optimal ratio to other data and cause loss of quality in data transfer. An existing server can be used to deliver non-multimedia data when adding multimedia applications. The applications and the associated multimedia data are transparent to LAN Server Ultimedia. LAN Server Ultimedia will be out in early December for $3,200 for the first server and $3,035 for additional server licences.
