IBM Corp’s plan to to convert SNA networks from hierarchical to peer-to-peer took a step forward yesterday with the announcement of Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking for MVS/ESA mainframes. No shipping dates though, with the company saying only that it will appear sometime next year, as will a promised upgrade to AIX SNA Services/6000, said to improve APPN support for the RS/6000. A few customers are receiving advance copies of VTAM v4, which embodies the mainframe implementation, and IBM is awaiting their comments. An impassioned statement of openness and commitment to local area networks by Ellen Hancock, IBM’s vice-president and general manager of networking systems, was accompanied by the announcement that the company is indeed licensing its APPN network node specifications to manufacturers that want to include their routers in APPN networks. Novell Inc, 3Com Corp and Network Equipment Technologies Inc are the first to take the bait and get the OEM pack which includes 110,000 lines of code. Cisco Systems Inc is a notable absentee, but IBM claims that they are in discussions. The openess theme was carried further with a promise to support SNA, OSI, TCP/IP, NetBIOS and IPX traffic transparently on networks by interposing yet another layer of software, the Common Transport Semantics Layer, between the network and the application. TCP/IP is now formally part of Systems Application Architecture. On the network management front, IBM plans to enhance NetView version 2, to expand its scope to managing APPN resources. It says that the APPN management tools will be based on OSI and CCITT .700 management specifications – the first time that IBM has mentioned letting OSI into NetView. Though the mainframe, RS/6000 and Netview announcements were fairly nebulous, some product shipment dates were announced. The 3174 cluster controller will support TCP/IP over Token Ring by August, and the third quarter should see Network Services/DOS Version 1, enabling MS-DOS micros to act as low entry nodes in APPN networks. By using CPI-C, the SAA common programming interface for Communications, users can develop distributed applications. IBM reckons that version 1 cuts memory requirement for APPC support to between 90Kb and 140Kb.
