As part of British Airways` (BA) international roll-out of Olicom`s Token Ring products to dramatically reduce downtime, partners ICL SA and Olicom Africa have concluded a deal to install the high performance networking technology at BA operations in South Africa.
Area manager for Olicom Africa, Nick Muller, says the Token Ring products have total redundancy built into solutions, an especially vital feature as the BA site is extremely mission-critical, with any downtime resulting in the loss of millions of pounds.
ICL`s international trade relationship with Olicom has established the company as an Olicom ClearPartner with the ability to install and provide support services for the ClearStep suite of products. This includes switched Token Ring, Fast Ethernet, dedicated Token Ring, and 100 Mbps High-Speed Token-Ring.
ICL business consultant, Andre van Biljon, explains that ICL SA engineers are fully trained in Token Ring technology and played an important supervisory role with the installation of the network at BA.
"Our major task was to ensure that that installation process met with Olicom`s international standards, and that BA received the necessary support," he says.
BA`s IT manager for Southern Africa, David Newark, adds that Olicom`s Token Ring was chosen for its performance and resilience, noting that the airline was most impressed with the timeous delivery, smooth implementation and excellent support provided by both ICL SA and Olicom.
Developed in 1984 and endorsed by IBM, Token Ring technology is used by major corporates worldwide, primarily for its efficiency and the ability to transform legacy networks into high performance networks.
"Token Ring has traditionally worked at 4 or 16 Mbps on the network while alternate protocols such as Ethernet operated at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps and, more recently, 1000Mbps and 1 Gbps," explains Olicom`s Muller.
"Because of Token Ring`s efficiency, development on High Speed Token Ring was somewhat delayed, but this product has now reached the market and is currently being installed at many sites, with a Gigabit Token Ring expected to be available before the end of 1999."
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