IBM Corp has expanded its alliance with Menlo Park, California-based Cisco Systems Inc, with its Field Service Support Group taking over on-site servicing of Cisco products and its Large-Scale Computing Division providing Cisco with the necessary Escon chip set so that Cisco can provide direct channel attachment between its internetwork routers and IBM mainframes. By mid-1994, Cisco will have a family of board-level interfaces that directly attache the mainframe channel with the Cisco 7000 high-end router, supporting both bus-and-tag and its 17M-byte-per-second Escon architectures. Cisco has established its channel-attach development team in Raleigh, North Carolina to be near IBM’s internetworking group. The channel attach links to Cisco routers will use the Network File System and TCP/IP protocols.
