Rather than going it alone, 3Com Corp, San Jose has picked Cascade Communications Corp to help it enter the Frame Relay market. 3Com is to combine its routing expertise (in the form of its NETBuilder routers and Boundary Routing System Architecture) with Cascade’s Frame Relay STDX switches to help customers build large multiprotocol wide area networks. Although Frame Relay interfacing is by no means a difficult task, Nigel Oakley, 3Com’s UK product marketing manager, says the advantages of the link-up are manifold. Both companies feel that their architectures are complementary; he adds that Cascade has been very successful in the US and that the product has a number of innovative features. In particular, the combination of the two companies’ technologies is said to result in wide area network architectures that are highly scalable, simple to administer, and cost-efficient. Similarly there is said to be the opportunity for increasing the manageability of the whole system by enabling local network management to extend into the wide area network. According to 3Com, router administration is reduced through its Boundary Routing System Architecture – it says five to 10 times more remote site connections can be added without adding resources, complexity or risk – and Cascade’s switching technologies are said to produce cost-effective wide area network backbones that are easily managed. Routing on the wide area backbone means efficient traffic management and wide area link use as well as availability of multiple paths, and standards-based management plus simpler and faster administration, installation and change control. Independent test laboratory LANQuest has found that support for a new protocol can be added to a 100-node Boundary Router network in under 10% the time taken on a network routed by standard means, says 3Com.
