roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese) (10/14/87)
Does anyone know of a product providing an Ethernet-to-Hyperchannel gateway? I'm looking for a "black box" to sit on an ethernet and pass TCP-IP and its friends in both directions. -- ///==\\ (Your message here...) /// Roger B.A. Klorese, CELERITY (Northeast Area) \\\ 40 Speen St., Framingham, MA 01701 +1 617 872-1552 \\\==// celtics!roger@necntc.nec.com - necntc!celtics!roger
shor@sphinx.uchicago.edu (Melinda Shore) (10/14/87)
In article <1822@celtics.UUCP> roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese) writes: >Does anyone know of a product providing an Ethernet-to-Hyperchannel >gateway? I'm looking for a "black box" to sit on an ethernet and >pass TCP-IP and its friends in both directions. No offense, but ha, ha, ha. We're in the same position, since we need to run TCP/IP on our Cray and we get to the machine through the Hyperchannel, and the whole thing has been pretty aggravating. Don't bother talking with NSC, they don't even have their IP-able driver in alpha-test yet. It turns out that most of the people in the world who do this use a Sun. John Lekashman at NASA-Ames has modified 4.3 if_hy.c so that actually works on a macro-Vax (Unibus), and I've almost finished hacking that up to work on with a PI12 on a microVax. John's driver is available for anonymous ftp from orville.arpa. Contact me if you want the microVax version. As far as I know, nobody has come up with any kind of standalone bridge. -- Melinda Shore ..!hao!oddjob!sphinx!shor Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center shore@morgul.psc.edu
wade@violet.berkeley.edu (Wade Stebbings) (10/15/87)
> Does anyone know of a product providing an Ethernet-to-Hyperchannel > gateway? I'm looking for a "black box" to sit on an ethernet and > pass TCP-IP and its friends in both directions. We dedicate a Vax 750 for this purpose, but I hear that Network Systems is going to offer an ethernet adapter soon. Unfortunately, this is all I know about it. Check with your local NSC rep. Wade Stebbings CFC -- UC Berkeley wade@violet.berkeley.edu
dave@rosesun.Rosemount.COM (Dave Marquardt) (10/15/87)
In article <1822@celtics.UUCP> roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese) writes: >Does anyone know of a product providing an Ethernet-to-Hyperchannel >gateway? I'm looking for a "black box" to sit on an ethernet and >pass TCP-IP and its friends in both directions. We just met with a Network Systems Corp. salesman this week, and NSC themselves now have Hyperchannel-Ethernet bridges. Here's a short description of some products: EN601: Bridges Ethernets over HYPERchannel-10(r) (10 Mbps media) EN602: Bridges Ethernets over HYPERchannel(r) telecommunication links (up to 2 Mbps) EN603: Bridges Ethernets over HYPERchannel-50(r) (50 Mbps) EN641: The IP Router EN641 from Network Systems(r) provides a gateway between Ethernet networks and HYPERchannel(r) networks. This gateway creates an internet, or backbone, among local workstation networks and high-performance mainframes attached to HYPERchannel(r). HYPERchannel is a registered trademark of Network Systems Corporation. Dave
chris@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU (Chris Johnston) (10/16/87)
In article <1822@celtics.UUCP> roger@celtics.UUCP (Roger B.A. Klorese) writes: >Does anyone know of a product providing an Ethernet-to-Hyperchannel >gateway? I'm looking for a "black box" to sit on an ethernet and >pass TCP-IP and its friends in both directions. Yesterday I was reading the Oct 1 Electronics. (I'm way behind on my reading.) It had an article about a new ethernet hyperchannel router from Network Systems. Fully configured ($50K) it will handle 8 ethernets and 2 hyperchannels. They claim it will handle 10,000 packets per second. The EN641 is an IP router. The EN60X is a bridge. The same issue of Electronics says AMD has announced a 200 Mbit/sec FDDI chip set. cj
ddk@beta.UUCP (David D Kaas) (10/17/87)
Network Systems Corp. has products that will connect Ethernet to Hyperchannel. EN60x Bridge for Ethernet to Ethernet over a Hyperchannel link. IP router En641 as an Ethernet to Hyperchannel gateway. They support tcp/ip for some hosts (vm, mvs, vms...) I think these have been released in just the last few weeks. They are supposed to be up and working? -- Dave Kaas - D.O.E. Richland, Wa. e41126%rlvax3.xnet@lanl.gov
ras@rayssdb.RAY.COM (Ralph A. Shaw) (10/19/87)
We at Raytheon have had some experience with the Hyperchannel products, in particular the BC601, or EN601 as it is now known. While I do not speak for the larger group of sites within the company, I'll try and bring up some of the problems we think we have run into with the EN601 product. This is merely using the Hyperchannel bus as a carrier, and allowing ethernets to talk to each other, and is not performing any type of gateway/protocol translation facility between the TCP, DECNet, XNS or other protocol machines and the NETEX/BFX machines. We have a number of different locations scattered throughout Mass and this site in RI that are interconnected via both A-Hyperchannel and B-Hyperchannel equipment over T1 lines. Some of the locations are tied together with Bridge GS3/M's, some with Vitalink Translan's, some with the AT&T ISN "EBIM" adapters, and 5 locations with the NSC EN601's, all presumably as part of an evaluation and/or production installation, both of which add up to sites in at least 10 towns on an extended ethernet; (total net population: 300+, 70% DECNet) To make a long story short, many of the problems we have had have been related to having such a widely spread out extended LAN. One of the failings of the EN601 is the lack of visibility into what is going on, in the way of maintenance and diagnostic aids as an ethernet bridge, compared to the Bridge/Vitalink style of products. Another problems may result in an inconsistency of loop detection algorithms between the different vendors' bridges (while Bridge/Vitalink are supposed to cooperate). Yet Another situation (which is still unclear as to it's impact) is the fact that at least multicast packets are batched up into a 4K buffer, and then VC-transferred to each other EN601 in sequence, imposing quite a delay when the BFX traffic is going on (making for very choppy telnet sessions). Anyway, the 601's are still here, and NSC is supposedly working on the problems we have with them, and they have improved them dramatically in the time since we first got them in (we were an early Beta-test), but I think that no matter what they do, the BC601 will always be compromised by the fact it has to time-slice over the HyperChannel. -- Ralph Shaw, Raytheon Co., Submarine Signal Division Portsmouth, RI 02871 ras@rayssd.RAY.COM or ihnp4!rayssd!ras