Interop till you drop

By NETWORK WORLD STAFF
Network World, 05/17/99

LAS VEGAS - NetWorld+Interop 99 last week had a definite edge - the leading edge.

The annual Las Vegas extravaganza not only showed the latest and greatest, but threw in a fair amount of the up and coming to boot. The hottest of the hot technologies were virtual private networks (VPN), quality of service (QoS) and voice over IP.

At the show, one of the things Network World learned is that 3Com will announce a new version of its Dynamic-Access LAN adapter software in June that works with non-3Com network interface cards.

DynamicAccess 2.0 will add QoS, policies and other "intelligence" to any Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS)-complaint NIC, including those from rival Intel.

3Com is offering its software to users of rival NICs to "overcome objections from customers with non-3Com NICs," says Stephen Philip, director of marketing in 3Com's PC business unit.

3Com also demonstrated a wave division multiplexing (WDM) module for its CoreBuilder 9000 switch that will allow users to build optical campus nets. WDM sends traffic over fiber lines using laser lightstreams.

3Com's module supports 8G bit/sec of aggregate bandwidth and a single-mode fiber connection up to 35 kilometers. 3Com did not say when the module will ship or how much it will cost.

At Cisco's booth, the company demonstrated a new version of its QoS Policy Manager that supports the Common Open Policy Server (COPS) protocol, an emerging standard for disseminating policy data from servers to network devices. COPS will be included in Qo S Policy Manager 2.0, which will also include tighter directory integration that will let network executives more easily parse QoS according to user needs.

Also showing leading technology were Hewlett-Packard, Alteon and Extreme Networks with hastily assembled NICs for running Gigabit Ethernet over copper. Broadcom chips fresh from the factory were rushed to HP and Alteon and soldered onto waiting boards ju st in time to reach the show. Extreme would not say whose chips it used.

Meanwhile, Cisco and Nortel Networks software engineers wrote code so their companies' routers in the show's demonstration lab could interoperate using Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), a proposed standard to speed IP packets through routed networks. The demonstration employed Label Distribution Protocol (LDP), the shorthand by which routers swiftly read, relabel and pass labeled packets along a predetermined path through a network, reducing routing delay.

In another InteropNet Labs demonstration, Nortel wheeled out a prototype switch that powers IP phones in a network. Rather than requiring a separate electrical connection to a wall socket, the phones got power from a port on a Nortel Baystack 350 switch. As long as the network has power, so do the phones.

Also at InteropNet Labs, virtual private network (VPN) vendors, including Internet Dynamics, Radguard and TimeStep, demonstrated interoperability between their products using the IP Security standard for authenticating and encrypting IP packets. The vendo rs attempted to establish security associations with each of the other vendors' VPN equipment, then pass data across the secure tunnel.

Vendors had to scramble to succeed. Internet Dynamics, for example, which could not establish secure links with any of the other vendors' gear during a dry run of the test 10 days before the show, wound up successfully doing so with all 11 other vendors' products by showtime.

At Sprint, the company again touted its leading-edge ION network.

Last week, Chairman William Esrey demonstrated some combined voice and data applications for ION at small-business and residential locations. After the demonstration he held a press conference in which he acknowledged that the service - which aggregates v oice, video and data through a single access device and local access line - is still evolving.

Esrey revealed in his keynote that Sprint plans to sell a software package called ION Desktop Manager, which will let users manage multiple phone calls plus data and video sessions from a single-client desktop.

The tone of Esrey's remarks was different from a year ago, when he announced ION at a Broadway theater and said only Sprint had the capability to provide such a converged service. For example, Esrey said AT&T's strategy of reaching residential locations v ia cable lines is a "viable strategy." But he added: "I do question the amount of money they're spending to put all this together."

On another matter, Esrey acknowledged that Sprint's partnerships for global, wireless and integrated-access services have not been problem-free. Many have been marked by internal disagreements.

Sprint and other companies are pressing hard to become one-stop shops for application hosting and net connections. As a result, Esrey said in his keynote, "The traditional duties of the network manager will go the way of the keypunch operator.The network manager will worry about data, not routers. IS will not be a call center, but rather a business unit." o