As reported briefly last week, Cisco Systems Inc has taken an audacious swipe at IBM Corp’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking, APPN, licensing policy by proposing an open alternative dubbed Advanced Peer-to-Peer Internetworking (CI No 2,007). APPN is IBM’s set of protocols designed to build distributed networks. While the company has already licensed end-node code, router manufacturers are still waiting on availability of the complex and crucial network node software. There has also been considerable disquiet about the amount that IBM is charging for network node source code, with figure such as $500,000 for a one time charge, plus royalties on each unit sold. To date nobody, other that IBM, has seen the code, according to the internetworking company. Advanced Peer to Peer Internetworking is being positioned by Menlo Park, California-based Cisco as a partial alternative, which should prove especially suitable for users that have existing TCP/IP networks – APPI will take APPN’s directory facility and some class of service capabilities and run them over TCP/IP protocols.
Frame Relay Forum
Cisco reckons that the approach should be quicker and more robust than using the lower layers of native APPN, and is trying to avoid the ‘proprietary’ label by gathering consortium of companies to control the development of APPI: ‘much in the same way that the Frame Relay Forum developed its technology’ according to a Cisco spokeswoman. APPI will be in the public domain and free for all to use. However the company stresses that it will still be licensing APPN from IBM and that it is developing a dual approach to the market, whereby both APPN and APPI will be incorporated into its routers. In effect Cisco is going to collect together a number of big players, arm them with a substantial weapon and then threaten to beat IBM around the head and shoulders unless the APPN licensing terms are reasonable. So far British Telecommunications Plc, Alcatel NV, Cabletron Systems Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Infonet Inc and McData Inc have expressed interest in joining the club. The APPI approach should not prove too difficult to implement. The technique of encapsulating SNA traffic in Internet Protocol packets is well understood and essentially, this is the approach that Cisco is taking. What is new is the ability to look inside the SNA frames to determine class of service requirements, and the APPN directory support.
Greed has given way to desperation at IBM Corp but the net effect is the same: the company charges so much over the odds for licences to its proprietary technology, be it mainframe software, where users are being forced to give serious thought to downsizing, or Micro Channel buses, where competitors decided that the bus wasn’t worth the premium and left PS/2 under the cloud of being seen as an also-ran – that it trusses up the goose that lays its golden eggs and has the poor creature for supper. Now, ignoring the fact that it no longer exercises the kind of control over the market to which it has long been accustomed, it has set licence fees for its Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking way over what competitors are prepared to pay, and a concerted opposition is being rallied. Chris Rose reports.
Implementation will come in two stages. By the third quarter of 1993 Cisco says that it will have Open Network Nodes – routers that sit on the outside of the Internet Protocol cloud and attach directly to SNA end nodes. When it comes to routing traffic, the system will be able to be configured either to have a central address server, or a fully distributed database where each Open Network Node holds its own database of network addresses. At this stage also, the company is bringing Simple Network Management Protocol management to bear on IBM networking. Cisco reckons that it will develop an open, public domain Management Information Base that will support such things as session accounting. Stage 2 of the Cisco plan sees the APPI routers make their way into the cloud, rather than sitting on the periphery. These SNA intermediate router capabilities
should enable the routers to recognise particular SNA session types and adhere to the class of service that they require. Essentially this means that users can look inside the SNA packets to determine which need to be forced along fixed routes rather than relying on the normal TCP/IP practice of routing route the traffic dynamically. Despite the current lack of agreement between the two companies on APPN licensing, Cisco says that its implementation of IBM’s native APPN should be completed by the third quarter of 1994.
Arbitrary manner
The idea is that the user should be able to mix APPI and APPN nodes in an arbitrary manner. It remains to be seen how much steam the APPI consortium will manage to generate, but the fact that Cisco is intending to make the specifications free of charge will do its acceptance no harm at all. Even arch-rival Wellfleet Communications Inc welcomed the news, although for reasons of its own, Jean Pierre Boespflug, Wellfleet’s vice-president for Europe said we think it is a very courageous statement on the part of Cisco to embark on this kind of development… it is an interesting challenge to IBM and we salute this. But he admits that his main reason for pleasure at the news is his idea that APPI marks a defocussing of Cisco away from Wellfleet’s core local network-to-local network internetworking business we always like to see them defocussed, so we like to see this sort of thing he says mischievously. We have seen a position in the market where niche players do best… we pride ourselves on being totally focussed on local network interconnection, he averred.
