Proteon Inc, the Westborough, Massachusetts-based all-round local network hardware specialist has made a small flurry of product announcements. Chief among them, at least in its own eyes, was an answer to IBM Corp’s 8230 intelligent Media Access Unit – the Proteon Series 90 Intelligent Network Concentrator. The company also talked about plans to enable its kit to be managed by a number of third-party management stations, using the SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol. But the single announcement that will cause most interest in the networking community as a whole is the news that it has developed a bi-directional NetView-to-SNA gateway which should begin shipping next month. The new Series 90 itself is a 10-slot chassis with the de rigueur redundant power supplies, hot swappable cards and so on. One aspect of the design which is worthy of note is the use of a low-power design, which means that the company has been able to do away with the need for cooling fans. The 10-slot chassis will be able to support FDDI, Token Ring, Ethernet and bridging-routing cards, though at the moment the company is focussing on Token Ring over shielded and unshielded twisted pair and fibre. The Series 90 has an entry cost of around UKP90 per port, and an incremental cost of UKP65.
SNMP across the board
While the company claims to be supporting SNMP across the board, with the aim to have management agents on all of its network devices from adaptor boards upwards, the way in which it is supporting management on the Series 90 and older Series 70 wire centre looks decidedly quirky. Instead of putting a user agent on the devices themselves, all hub management will be carried on over out-of-band serial links to a specialised station which converts this proprietary information into the SNMP format. The same station can also decode the management information, carried as standard in the 802.5 Token Ring packets. But why choose this approach, rather than build an SNMP management card directly in the System 90? To keep the cost down, says the company, but also because it intends to move the agent software into the file server at some stage: a NetWare loadable module is currently being developed. But it is the NetView-SNA gateway which is potentially the star of the show. The company reckons that it is the first of its kind – an OS/2-based piece of software that provides two-directional SNMP integration with NetView and System Center Inc’s Net/Master. Exactly how useful the product will be is difficult to judge until it begins shipping and can be properly evaluated. But, at around UKP3,650 in the UK, the software looks as if it could be a useful way of joining the rather unfriendly SNMP and NetView worlds. Proteon also says that it is introducing a Gateway toolkit for systems integrators to get access to SNMP management from within NetView and Net/Master. Lastly, on the management theme, the company announced that it is now combining the functions of its Teleview and Overview network management packages into a single product called Oneview. Costing between UKP4,000 and UKP11,500, integrated OneView can be used to manage the Series 70, 90 CNX 500, P4100+ and any other SNMP-based devices attached to the network. During the course of the announcements, Proteon clarified the position regarding its managed adaptor strategy. As recently reported, different arms of the company have been giving conflicting versions as to just how much protocol stack processing actually occurred on the card. But Kumar Shah, Proteon’s senior product manager, issued what looks like the definitive statement when he said that almost all stack processing is handled by the Texas Instruments Inc Token Ring chip set.
