Westborough, Massachusetts-based Proteon Inc has announced its support for IBM Corp’s new DLSw Data Link Switching interoperability standard. Data Link Switching is an IBM-sponsored, standardised approach for SNA and NetBIOS applications currently using proprietary tunnelling and conversion techniques. The DLSw standard – being defined by the Data Link Switching Workgroup – has gained momentum since IBM introduced the protocol specification known as RFC-1434. Proteon says that it expects to deliver DLSw support in the first quarter of 1994, making it the first vendor to do so. Cisco Systems Inc, Menlo Park has already announced that it will offer support by the middle of next year, but it qualified this by saying that it would depend on the progress made by the Data Link Switching Group in finalising the standard. According to Proteon, there is still a lot of work to be done on the standard, and it expects all first implementations – including its own – will be proprietary. Proteon claims that it will be the first vendor to market because most of the underlying switching technologies are already included in its existing software. Proteon says that its Data Link Switching implementation will include four levels of prioritisation; bandwidth reservation to ensure predictable response time and guaranteed applications availability; Multicast Open Shortest Path First capability; and a shared memory architecture. The company says it has not yet set prices on the planned implementation.
