Pursuing its strategy of buying in technologies for which it has no in-house expertise, Cabletron Systems Inc has turned to Littleton, Massachusetts-based Nashoba Networks Inc for its Concord eight 8- or 16-port Token Ring switch. Under the terms of the deal, Rochester, New Hampshire-based Cabletron will take the product OEM as the TSX-1620, pitching worldwide for both workgroup and backbone switch applications. Cabletron was attracted to the product since it is one of the first to offer network management through both Simple Network Management Protocol and remote monitoring, it said. The product will ship in 90 days at a per-port cost of $1,600. Further down the line, Cabletron is planning to develop its own Token Ring switching module for the Internal Network Bus MMAC-Plus hub. Details are sketchy at this stage, but the new module will be marketed for high-end data centre switching applications, and will be available by the first half of next year, says the company. Cabletron has also been formalising its SNA strategy, and has given it the name OpenSNA. The first phase is already available through the LCAM-BC module for the Multi Media Access Centre, MMAC, hub (CI No 2618): Cabletron says it is planning to add support for BM Corp’s high-speed Escon channels support to the Bus & Tag communications, which this provides, for both the MMAC and MMAC-Plus by the fourth quarter. The company now also supports TCP/IP pass-through on the LCAM-BC for users running TCP/IP on the mainframe, and plans to add TCP/IP pass-through by the end of the year. Cabletron also emphasised its commitment to offering SDLC/LLC conversion, BSC conversion, Frame Relay, IBM controller communications, Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking, Data Link Switching and channel attach interfaces via its partnerships with IBM, BusTech Inc, CCI Electronique Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Sync Research Inc.
