In a bid to demonstrate its commitment to ATM interoperability, Olicom submitted its recently released CrossFire family of ATM switches and routers to stringent tests conducted by the Network Interoperability Alliance (NIA) at a laboratory facility at the University of New Hampshire. The tests, carried out under the auspices of research organisation, The Tolly Group, confirmed that Olicom ATM switches and routers are fully interoperable with products from other leading providers of ATM solutions. Olicom products tested included a full range of end-to-end products for Token-Ring/ATM network solutions: ATM backbone switches, Token-Ring LAN switches with wire-speed ATM uplinks, ATM edge routers, and ATM server adapters. "The NIA test showed that Private Network-Network Interface (PNNI) and LAN emulation (LANE) interoperability functioned as they were designed to work in network backbone switches from multiple vendors," said Olicom Africa country manager Louis Appunn. The test, the third and largest sponsored by the NIA, focused on PNNI, ATM`s interior routing protocol used to set up Switched Virtual Circuits (SVCs). Ten NIA members participated in the test, including: Olicom, Bay Networks, First Virtual Corporation, IBM, General DataComm, 3Com, Xylan, FORE Systems, and Interphase. Cisco Systems equipment was also included in the test, although Cisco did not participate in or support the testing effort. Together, these 10 vendors account for more than 75% of switch shipments worldwide. "Considering the high level of compatibility between devices from the ten vendors represented, the results of the test are very encouraging," said Kevin Tolly, president of The Tolly Group. "The test results suggest a bright future for those customers who are embracing ATM and who therefore require PNNI for scalability and robustness." In addition to the ATM switch products, Olicom`s ClearServer solution for fault tolerant connectivity of ATM LAN servers was also successfully demonstrated in the NIA test. ClearServer is one component of Olicom`s ClearSession solutions, a complete set of redundancy options for deploying fully scalable, fault-tolerant ATM for mission-critical networks. Olicom`s ClearSession Network-Network Interface (CNNI) is included in all Olicom switches in addition to PNNI. The benefit of CNNI is a fast reconvergence rate (under three seconds) which allows for fault tolerant connectivity within Olicom-specific networks. Although the CNNI was not evaluated in this test, The Tolly Group report states that network reconvergence "represents one of the most important ingredients in the automation of network operation." The full report, "ATM Interoperability: PNNI Testing for the Network Interoperability Alliance" is available at www.tolly.com.
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