The first, long-awaited, products for Cisco Systems Inc’s IBM Corp-oriented networking framework, CiscoBlue, were announced last week, just a fortnight after rivals 3Com Corp and Bay Networks Inc also bolstered their IBM offerings. The products implement the CiscoBlue strategy for integrating SNA networks with high-performance, switched internetworks, and address three separate areas: the data center, wide area network communications and network management. For the data center, TN3270 Server is an application for Cisco’s Channel Interface Processor, enabling TN3270 clients access to IBM mainframes. The software offloads 100% of the TCP/IP and TN3270 cycles from the mainframe, to increase performance of the network and the host system. Each channel-attached Channel Interface Processor board in a Cisco 7000 family router can support up to 8,000 TN3270 sessions and several Channel Interface Processors can be deployed on a single router. The Cisco Internetwork Operating System software is being enhanced to enable integrated IBM internetworks to take advantage of switched backbone offerings of public networks. Enhancements include Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking support for direct transport over Asynchronous Transfer Mode; Switched Multi-Megabit Data Services and ISDN; DLSw+ Data Link Switching Plus enhancements, including SNA Dial-on-Demand Routing, DLSw Lite and Boundary Access Node capability. Both Bay and 3Com also announced DLSw and Boundary Access Node support, as well as High Performance Routing support in their routers. DLSw Lite provides transport for SNA traffic over Frame Relay networks, without requiring the overhead of TCP/IP, while still offering DLSw features such as broadcast reduction, dynamic searching and local acknowledgment. In addition, the CiscoWorks Blue suite of integrated network management applications has been enhanced with Maps and SNA View. Maps enables customers to retrieve logical views of both SNA and IP networks that are dynamically updated, while SNA View overlays the SNA logical network to include physical and logical units. The TN3270 Server software is a separately-licensed feature of the Channel Interface Processor board, which is available for the Early Support Program this month, and generally available in the third quarter of 1996. DLSw Lite and the new APPN media, SNA Dial-on-Demand Routing and Boundary Access Node are available now. CiscoWorks Blue Maps is out now in four versions all costing $5,000. The four-version SNA View is also available with pricing running from $9,000 to $20,000.
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