wild@xanath.odu.EDU (05/22/87)
DIGITAL REVIEW
MAY 18, 1987
Defense Dept. Enlists DEC In OSI Initiative
By Michael Vizard
LITTLETON, MASS. - Scoring a major coup in its bid to control the
industry's move towards open standards, DEC last week was selected by the
Department of Defense to participate in a project designed to build
gateways between networks using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP) that the Defense Department sponsored and the developing
Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) protocol that is being advanced by the
International Standards Organization (ISO).
DEC's role in the project, which is being supervised by the National
Bureau of Standards (NBS), involves supplying its ISO-compliant networking
software, All-In-1 Office and Information Systems, VMS operating system
and a MicroVAX II to the NBS, while a library of TCP/IP networking
software is being provided by Network Research Corp. (NRC) of Oxnard,
Calif.
The Payoff
"It looks like it's paid off for DEC to get all those OSI products out
early," said George Newman, an analyst with the Framingham, Mass.,
research firm International Data Corp. "It's a coup for DEC, because now
they have an opportunity to mold and shape OSI."
Meanwhile, James Hunter, president of NRC, noted, "You can expect that DEC
and NRC products will be compliant with the new OSI gateways. It's hard
to find true charity."
For the Defense Department, the development of TCP/IP-to-OSI gateways will
ease its transition from the multivendor TCP/IP networking standard it
championed in the early 1970s to the higher-performance OSI standard.
By migrating to an OSI standard sponsored by the computer industry, the
Defense Department is reducing its costs associated with the design,
testing, maintenance and purchase of TCP/IP.
The OSI standard, however, is not fully developed, and by commissioning
DEC and NRC to develop these gateways, the Defense Department is creating
a migration path from TCP/IP to OSI before the OSI standards are
completed.
"The OSI standards will not be ratified until late in 1988 at the
earliest," NRC's Hunter said, "but the government has to worry about the
problem of tying TCP/IP to OSI today."
As a result, the NBS will first write an application that bridges OSI's
Message Handling Facility/X.400 (MHF) protocol to the Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP) used in TCP/IP. Later, the NBS will bridge OSI's File
Transfer, Access and Management Protocol (FTAM) to TCP/IP's File Transfer
Protocol (FTP).
"You could see a gateway as early as the summer of 1988," Hunter said.
Meanwhile, the NBS will make its specifications public so that other
companies will be able to build TCP/IP-to-OSI gateways.
The new gateway project, said William Johnson, president of DEC's
Distributed Systems group, will provide both industry and the government
with a clear migration path to OSI.