Hot on the heels of fast Ethernet comes fast Token Ring: Madge NV’s Madge Networks Inc in San Jose yesterday launched the Smart 100 Ringnode family, a line of 100Mbps Fiber Distributed Data Interface network adaptor boards aimed at 16Mbps Token Ring users. In order to assist Token Ring customers with planning their migration path from 16Mbps to 100Mbps network computing, Madge is introducing the concept of Fast Token Ring, which is simply media-independent FDDI, the company says, pointing out that the FDDI standard is based on Token Ring, adapted to run at 100Mbps – hence Fast Token Ring, which runs on the same cabling media as 16Mbps Token Ring: shielded twisted pair, Category 5 or datagrade unshielded twisted pair and fibre. The first Madge products are for EISA bus systems: Smart 100 EISA Ringnodes come in fibre and copper variants including Single Attach and Dual Attach Station versions. The latter can be used to connect a station directly into the dual trunk ring of a network, avoiding the need for a hub, Madge notes, or to connect a station to two separate FDDI hubs to provide a fault-tolerant network connection. Smart 100 EISA Ringnodes for use with copper cabling come with a daughterboard module that can be field-swapped for operation with shielded or unshielded twisted pair. An on-board processor handles the station management protocol to eliminate the processing and memory overhead of managing the FDDI ring from the host. They come with software drivers for NetWare 3.11 and 4.0, IBM LAN Server 2.0 and 3.0, Microsoft LAN Manager 2.1 and 2.2. Madge claims unrivalled performance as a result of its new Transmit-Receive Packet Pipelining technology, part of Fastmac 100. Receive Packet Pipelining cuts the time takenfor a packet to be received from the network into the host memory by passing the data to the host while the packet is being received without buffering on the adaptor, Transmit Packet Pipelining enables the adaptor to begin transmitting a packet onto the network as soon as the host begins passing data to the adaptor. Smart 100 EISA Ringnode for shielded twisted pair is $1,400, the one for fibre $1,750, now. The Ringnode for MLT-3 cable is $1,400 next quarter, the Dual Attach Station is $2,000 this quarter, the dual for MLT-3 is $2,000 next quarter, dual for fibre is $2,700 this quarter.
