Santa Clara, California-based Synoptics Communications Inc has a new data privacy and control product for Ethernet and two new management modules for statistical collection. Called LattisSecure, the privacy and control product protects network information from eavesdropping and unauthorised access by ensuring that only the intended destination receives the packet; should an unauthorised station try to intercept it, meaningless data is shown. The company claims that even with network analysers and packet decoders, hackers will only get garbled messages. A log of attempts at unauthorised access is kept, and if it is attempted LattisSecure can be set to isolate that segment from the network immediately. It can be controlled from a central management station, resides on a new 10Base-T Ethernet host module – the 3368, and is compatible with the IEEE 802.3 10Base-T standard. It supports 12 host connections and costs $1,700 in the US. It comes in the wake of the announcement of 3Com Corp’s LAN Security Architecture, which also encrypts data travelling over the local network. Having said that, 3Com seems to have a definite price advantage, since the figure being quoted is $60 per node, significantly cheaper than LattisSecure, though the latter seems to offer more in the way of features. Security, it seems, will be the new battleground among hub vendors seeking those elusive unique selling points for otherwise me-too kit.
Management modules
Last year’s battleground – management – is not dead yet, though, as also new from Synoptics are two new management modules, the 3313S and 3314S, for collecting statistics on errors, protocols and frame sizes on all capacities of Ethernet using MS-DOS or Unix. The two models perform the same functions, but the 3313S has an attachment unit interface interconnect port, while the 3314S Ethernet Network Management Module has a fibre optic inter-repeater link interconnect port with an ST connector. They are for use in the Synoptics System 3000 intelligent hub and feature a dual-processor architecture incorporating a dedicated PAC1000 frame processing unit to capture raw data at high speeds, and a Motorola Inc 68332 32-bit microprocessor for data analysis. The separation of these functions means that the modules can support Simple Network Management Protocol agents and administration of other systems’ tasks without any adverse effect on performance. Another new feature is the source/destination facility to give details on network status and show how the configuration could be improved, with categorisation of traffic possible both numerically and graphically either by protocol type or frame size. A new rate threshold feature compares Cyclic Redundancy Check errors or collisions to absolute traffic levels while thresholds for up to 288 parameters can be set simultaneously. The per-port traffic and error counters are compatible with IEEE 802.3 Repeater Management draft standard, the modules are claimed to offer a new generation of distributed management capabilities by delegating functionality to the managed segments – by working with the Network Control Engine, management data can be analysed at a local level, reducing pressure on the backbone. No UK prices yet, but in the US the 3313S lists for $7,000, the 3314S is $7,400.
