Considering the continued growth of its SNA router market, Bay has developed a series of features and services for enterprises and carriers who are migrating to an IP backbone and offers uncompromised levels of reliability, availability and maintainability.
Phase one of the strategy addresses the use of the TCP/IP network infrastructure for the convergence of SNA traffic. Future phases include delivering SNA access solutions to address customer desktop-to-data-center requirements, delivering "host access connections" via reduced cost ATM (including mainframe Open Systems Adapter) and gateway solutions, and providing integrated management of SNA and IP network resources.
With SNA accounting for nearly 60 percent of corporate WAN traffic, industry studies show that significant investments and resources continue to be directed towards the mainframe environment.
As enterprises migrate to a TCP/IP backbone, Data Link Switching (DLSw) allows for the termination of SNA sessions at the access device, encapsulation of SNA data into TCP/IP packets, and transmission on TCP/IP connections over the WAN. Bay has remained committed to this standards-based mechanism for transporting SNA data over IP and to delivering further advancements that address customer`s needs.
"In contrast to the varying reports of its demise, it has always been clear to us that SNA is not going to go away," said Bay systems engineer Sirshem Moodley.
"Today`s customer requirements are demanding the convergence of multiple networks onto an IP infrastructure. The initial phase of our strategy has been built upon Bay`s SNA services that have been in place for many years. By using the industry-leading BayRS IP infrastructure, these new features improve network convergence while reducing overhead, and providing end-to-end QoS and mission-critical redundancy."
Bay`s SNA program strategy will continue to roll out features that enable IBM mainframe customers to reliably converge SNA over IP. As carriers seek to take advantage of VPNs, Bay`s SNA over IP strategy optimises the IP network to provide end-to-end services capable of secure tunneling; with bandwidth and QoS guarantees delivering a deterministic response time as specified in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
SNA over IP adds to the capabilities that Nortel has already been supplying customers when it comes to the reliability, availability and manageability of SNA traffic. Bay and Nortel share a common track record and synergistic design objectives for high-performance products and ultra-reliable solutions that are built for SNA.
Phase one of the strategy includes the introduction of the following features:
1. RSVP for DLSw addresses "End-to-End QoS"
Users demand consistent response time for mission critical applications. RSVP for DLSw enables network administrators to reserve bandwidth based on time of day, by device, or at system start-up for SNA/DLSw traffic across an IP backbone. Special tuning of SNA networks for priority traffic is no longer required making network management easier.
2. Priority Queuing addresses Bandwidth Management
Providing additional flexibility to bandwidth management, Bay has extended Class of Service (CoS) and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities over enterprise networks. Up to eight queues may be used for each WAN interface. Traffic may be prioritised among all queues (low, medium and high), bandwidth may be apportioned by percentage, and service may be delivered in priority order.
3. APPN/Boundary Function for DLSw addresses IP Convergence
The DLSw/APPN boundary function allows users to traverse an IP network while still having access to enterprise-level applications via an APPN/HPR backbone network. DLSw traffic is terminated within the router allowing a single DLSw/APPN network to exist. The Boundary Function accepts traditional PU 2 or 2.1 traffic.
4. High Performance Routing over IP addresses IP Convergence
HPR functions improve availability and scalability, while giving customers the flexibility to design low-cost, high-performance networks. Facilitating APPN product interoperation in IP networks, HPR over IP extends transmission priority to IP networks.
5. IP Multicast with DLSw Reduces Network Traffic
As large companies are migrating to an "any-to-any" peer configuration using DLSw, IP Multicast with DLSw improves performance while eliminating overhead. The next generation of DLSw standard, Version 2 (RFC2166), uses multicasting to achieve this goal.
6. Back up Peers addresses Mission Critical Redundancy
DLSw Backup Peers help ensure redundancy for mission-critical applications. It guarantees session availability by providing secondary communications paths, where sessions are automatically transferred to a designated backup peer, for example, a dial backup connection.
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