Stallion Technologies Inc, whose staff confesses to being Unix bigots in the past, has popped the ROM in its remote access server, replaced it with new firmware, rewritten a bit of utility code and transformed it into the first network-ready remote access server for Windows NT. This week Stallion, which earns 90% of its living selling remote access widgetry to Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix-on-Intel Corp systems, will take the wraps off LantraServer, the NT reincarnation of what it’s been selling to Unix folks as EasyServer 2. The Soquel, California company won’t abandon its bread-and-butter SCO products, but SVP of worldwide sales Mark Calkins says the SCO market has been flattening out and the NT market, devoid of competing products, looks ripe for the picking. Stallion’s initial NT thrust will be a $2,500 eight-port standalone remote access server that extends NT-RAS, using NT’s built-in networking and remote access capabilities. The LantraServer provides on-demand dialing, multilink PPP connections, RAS security, a web- based GUI for set-up and support and a point-to-point tunneling protocol to help set up intranets, extranets and virtual private networks. Besides the LantraServer itself, Stallion will provide NT drivers and the Remote Access Management Package (RAMP) that runs on NT Server. The hardware/software combo results in a set-up that makes Lantra ports look like they are local com ports on the NT server. One of LantraServer’s neater tricks is to let any PC, including aging 80386s, and WinTerms access WinFrame servers without using TCP/IP or network interface cards. The first LantraServer will be followed in the second quarter by a model with four serial and four V.34 ports. Around the end of the third quarter or early fourth quarter, the company plans to have one with four serial ports and a pair of ISDN basic rate interfaces (BRIs).
