LYNCH@USC-ISIB.ARPA (Dan Lynch) (10/09/85)
I am interested in the suitability of Excelan products (hardware and software) for internet purposes. I recall seeing some bad press on their Ethernet board for the Masscomp machine. Does anyone else have any other data, good or bad? Just reply to me; no use filling the disks of america needlessly. Thanks, Dan -------
delp@HUEY.UDEL.EDU (Gary Delp) (10/09/85)
dan, Can you let me know what your responses are? thanks, gary
LYNCH@USC-ISIB.ARPA (Dan Lynch) (10/13/85)
I got about 10 responses on Excelan products and did some digging myself and have the following to report. Basically they make excellent hardware and their software has evolved from a shaky start to the current one where it is quite featureful and supports all the latest characteristics of TCP/IP. Their basic approach is to provide a board that plugs into the backplane ((Unibus, Qbus, Multibus, VMEbus and the IBM PC)) of your machine and drives the Ethernet from the board. Teh board also contains the full TCP/IP software. The host level software makes library calls (library software provided on a pe operating system basis) to do the usual things (open, send/receive, close,...) thus freeing up the host to do other things than messing with packet level interrupts and checksums. There are arguments for and against this apporach to doing networking. I wont detail them here. One misfeature of the current implementation is that since Excellan terminates the IP protocol in the offhost processor and that offhost processor has no provision for multiple network interfaces it cannot act as a gateway device in an Internet environment. The operating systems currently supported are Xenix, Unix System V, (for the VAX), VMS (including for the MicroVaxII), RSX-11M,PC-DOS and some other brands of System V that are OEM related. The real sleeper in their product line is a workstation they call the Nutcracker. It is a slick development/debugging/repairing tool that sits on your Ethernet and copies all packets into its buffers and then depending on the various sets of filters you have established it will take statistics of all kinds. It is fast enought to do tthis at full speed. It can also inject packets for any destination at any speed you wish and can even generate invalid packets for debugging purposes. Quite a lot of work has gone into this product and for research and development sites it looks like an invaluabe tool at many levels of design. The price for this complete workstation is not low, about $50k. You might not want to get one for home use, but its existence in a good indication of the level of engineering talent that exists inside the company. The prices on their boards and host software modules are quite reasonable and they give generous discounts for large volumes. They are located in San Jose and can be reached at 408-434-2300. Dan -------