Cascade Communications Corp has announced its Priority Frame architecture, which says the company can add Quality of Service guarantees to Frame Relay networks. Cascade is confident that it has provided the missing technology that has so far prevented IBM’s huge Systems Network Architecture installed base from moving to Frame Relay networks. According to Cascade, Priority Frame delivers the required reliability guarantee service performance enabling SNA applications to now migrate Frame Relay. It says that Priority Frame will enable Cascade to tap a significant market – less than 20% of the SNA installed base of 1 million ports has so far migrated to Frame Relay. By adding asynchronous transfer mode-like Quality of Service to Frame Relay that supports end-to-end wide-area-network service level agreements, Cascade says that Priority Frame will allow for different levels of delay and frame loss with Constant, Real Time Variable, Non-Real Time Variable, and Available-Unspecified Frame Rate services. These additions should enable network service providers to make use of existing Frame Relay infrastructure and offer new classes of service. For example, corporate sites can select premium IP services to guarantee high priority access to the Internet or to their corporate intranet while residential customers using the Internet for simple electronic mail and file transfer can select less-expensive services. Cascade says Priority Frame will make it the only vendor who can offer full class of service guarantees across hybrid Frame Relay and asynchronous transfer mode networks. The software will be available in mid-1997 as part of the B-STDX 8000 and 9000 system software at no additional charge.
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