DSC Communications Corp, the former Digital Switch Corp, of Santa Clara, California has made major additions to its Plan Series of local area network products as it steps up its efforts to increase its US market share into the double digits. Currently it claims between 3% and 5% of the local network market but expects to boost business levels by going after the private corporate market. The Business Network Systems Group, which is spearheading DSC’s push into the corporate networking market announced the 12 new products and system upgrades. These include four new communications gateways, an ARCnet-to-ARCnet bridge, 150Mb on-line streaming tape backup, a UKP2,495 80286-based workstation, $795 ARCnet cards for the IBM PS/2 family, and a variety of other Plan Series upgrades and enhancements. John Stafford, director of marketing for the local network division said We’ve concentrated our research and development efforts to support these customers’ large 50-to-100 node networks and strengthened our position in the ARCnet market, which is healthy and growing. DSC communication gateways offer links between Plan Series networks and IBM mainframes and mid-range machines, as well as public data networks. The company has announced SNA gateways for IBM’s mainframe and System 36 and 38 environments, asynchronous gateways for modem pooling, and X25 gateways for linking to public packet nets, each costing $5,995, now. The $8,495 ARC/Bridge allows up to four Plan networks to be linked and share resources. An online tape backup option can also now be added to Plan Series file servers through the $5,995 150/Streamer, $1,995 if you have a server. The 150/Streamer enables file updates to be recorded to the streaming tape drive, without requiring network shutdown. This guards against loss of data due to hardware or software failure.