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Blanchard, however, was supportive of the overall 5000 strategy, especially because SynOptics has taken pains to protect the users' investment in the LattisNet System 3000 installed base, SynOptics' current flagship hub."No one has to throw away their 3000s," he said. "You can still have them spread throughout your network and use the 5000 as the central hub in the collapsed backbone."The 5000 will also address one of the biggest knocks against the 3000, which involves the way it handles network management. The 3000 required a network management card for every LAN that the hub supported, reducing the number of users and Tiffany Somerset heart ring segments it can support."The 5000 will feature an integrated distributed net management approach that will eliminate the need for all those management modules," said one source.At long last, NCR Corp. answered IBM's 3172 Interconnect Controller with last week's introduction of the first in a line of controllers that connect local-area networks to IBM and compatible mainframes.

NCR unveiled the Comten 5909 processor, a device that attaches token-ring and Ethernet LANs to an IBM or compatible mainframe channel, facilitating high-speed file transfers for applications such as data storage and backup, as well as file and database serving. NCR officials Atlas I.D. money clip the 5909 allows users to recast their large mainframe machines as LAN servers instead of deploying them in the traditional role of centralized information system hubs.

The 5909, which had been expected (NW April 6, 1992, page 2), is the first member of NCR's new Comten 5900 line of LAN-to-mainframe connectivity products. It supports Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol data exchange between LANs and mainframes, and the same channel protocol used by the 3172 Interconnect Controller.

With the proliferation of LANs in mainframe sites, NCR Elsa Peretti Open Wave ring high hopes for its 5900 line.The 5909 supports up to four Ethernet or token-ring interfaces and a maximum of two bus and tag channel connections to the mainframe. It runs at 1.6M byte/sec when linking a single LAN to one mainframe channel and operates at a combined speed of 2.2M byte/sec when linking two LANs to two channels.Although the speed of an IBM bus and tag channel connection is 4.5M byte/sec, the 5909's channel throughput is comparable to IBM's 3172, said Suzanne Babich, director of product planning for NCR' s communications processor Paloma's Galife Ring unit.

The NCR controller sports a throughput of 3,400 TCP/IP packet/sec for packet sizes of 64 bytes. It can also support from 3,000 to 25,000 Telnet terminal-emulation sessions.The 5909 can also transfer data in one-tenth of a second, even when the device is 90% utilized.On the LAN, the 5909 supports any TCP/IP package on the market, including NCR's System 3000 Unix TCP/IP implementation. For mainframes, the 5909 handles any TCP/IP package that supports the 3172 channel protocol, including IBM's TCP/IP for MVS and VM, Interlink Computer Sciences, Inc.'s SNS) TCP access product and SNS/SNA Gateway package.

IBM's 3172, meanwhile, can be configured to connect LANs to hosts or to link Tiffany 1837 ring channels over wide-area nets. As a LAN gateway, the 3172 channel attaches IBM Token-Ring, Ethernet, Fiber Distributed Data Interface and token-bus LANs to Systems Network Architecture and TCP/IP hosts. As a remote channel-to-channel controller, the 3172 can attach two Enterprise System Connection (ESCON) or bus and tag channels to a remote host over T-1 links.

Upcoming versions of NCR's 5900 line are expected to support FDDI LANs, SNA, Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) and Network Basic I/O System protocols, as well as ESCON channel connections.