Conference 7.286::fddi

    Mike,
       Your questions would take a couple of hours to type in all the
    answers to. Your best bet is to talk to either Rodger Miles or Andy
    Putnins, your ANCs in Chicago. They can answer all your questions in
    more detail than would be practical to put in here.
    
    Debbie
    

re: .-1 ...  Mike should talk to his ANC's anyway, but that should not preclude 
discussing the issues here for the rest of us to see...

I give you what I know from my six month battle with cisco...

Their FDDI board today is encapsulating ... translation is "in beta test" ...
if it exists, I haven't seen it, and I think my customer would be one of the 
first.

Single Mode Fiber support was recently announced.   Product?   Same as above.
cisco currently recommends running their multimode FDDI board with an ODS 
converter to drive Single Mode.

I recently participated in a test with my customer, who was trying to get a 
pair of cisco AGS+ boxes to work over a 40km loop, with the ODS converters.
After 3 1/2 weeks of tinkering, they called me and asked if I had a solution 
that would work.   We put in a pair of Single Mode concentrators, and hung a 
couple of DECbridge 500's off them, and it fired up and ran right out of the 
box!   (They had also tried Ungermann-Bass, with no luck)

As for translation vs. encapsulation, there are numerous papers on the topic, 
but in a nutshell, if you encapsulate:

   - You will only talk to devices that understand YOUR encapsulation routine.

   - You will not be able to talk to "native" FDDI devices.

Encapsulation is easier to achieve than translation.  (See Digital Technical
Journal Vol 3 No 2, Spring 1991, Order # EY-H876E-DP)   Thus for an 
under-engineered product, encapsulation will be faster.   

cisco has a maximum FDDI performance of 20K pps with encapsulation, and 
multiprotocol routing enabled (per cisco customer service).  Therefore, unless
they make some serious improvements with their translating product, it can
be expected that the performance will be less.

Our DECbridge 5xx products, on the other hand, translate at full speed.  Our 
DECbridge 6xx products do not.  (~22.2K pps w/3-NI)

cisco, as a company, is scum.  Never bring them into your account (regardless 
of what NWSS tells you) unless you do not expect to do any networking business 
with that customer ever again.

Good luck, and let us know if you win!

Bob

RE: .-1

> cisco, as a company, is scum.

This sort of comment in not very professional, and has no place in a conference
like this.  This conference is, for all intents, public, and if this type of
comment were to reach either Cisco or our customers, it would not be very
pleasent for Digital.

Cisco is our "worthy competitor", and should always be refered to as such.
Their products are much more in line with what our customers want than Digitals
current product set.  While you may not like them because they are 
"the competition", they have just as much right to be in the marketplace as
Digital.  If you personally feel that they have shoddy business practices, then
keep that to yourself.

The marketplace decides who should make a proffit, and in this case, it appears
Cisco has won.  The market would rather have the functionality that they offer,
even with bugs and imperfect performance rather than a box from Digital which
lacks functionality, is way over engineered, and way over priced.  Digital 
builds the Cadilacs, Lincolns, and Porsches, the market wants the Hondas,
Toyotas, and Ford Escorts.

RE: Unprofessional Comments...

My comment is my opinion, based on my experience, and I stand by it.  Besides,
I never said it was my PROFESSIONAL opinion.   8^)

re: cisco

The cisco sales and support people I have dealt with are cheats and liars. (My 
opinion)  Some direct quotes:

"We are the leading FDDI vendor in the world"

"We developed the FDDI standard"

"We worked exclusively with Apple to resolved the Appletalk over FDDI problem
 and are the only vendor who has the solution."

"We can route FDDI faster than Digital can bridge it"

They have gone back to our customers after an RFQ response and undercut 
OUR pricing for THEIR product, so that the sales person could book the 
business directly and make his commission.

In my PROFESSIONAL opinion, people who do business in this manner, and the 
companies that support them are not "worthy competitors."   

Scum might not be professional, but its a lot more accurate than "worthy 
competitors."

Bob

    re .4
    
    	Do I understand correctly that we quote prices for cisco equipment?
    
    	Why?
    
    	FWIW,.. the problem with your opinions is that they are being
    expressed in a "public" conference,.. and Digital, the corporation,
    can be held liable for these statements even though they are your
    personal opinion. This is why there are policies about making such
    statements. So,. while I may or may not agree with *what* you say,
    you must understand that you just can't say whatever you want in the
    notesfiles. I wouldn't be surprised to see this stream deleted/set
    hidden very shortly.
    
    							/Bill

    re:.5
    
    Dear Mr. Van Winkle,
    
    It is now 1991, not 1971.  You have slept a while.  While all of the
    changes that have occurred in the past two decades may shock you, I
    call your attention to a couple of them.  One is that Digital's field
    is no longer constrained to pumping Digital's hardware and nothing
    else.  We sell "solutions", "systems integration", etc., and if other
    vendors' products are included, that's okay.   The second is that cisco
    Systems has as Basic Order Agreement with NWSS for Digital to resell.
    This is a now rather normal practice, but in the instant case, cisco
    went to the press with it as if it were Digital's endorsement of their
    products, and made a lot of hay.  It put a very bad taste in a lot of
    people's mouths.  Lots of NOTES (even here, I suspect) have been
    written about it, so you may wish to peruse what was written during
    your slumber.
    
    And btw, Digital's NOTES policy is pretty clear about slander, but it
    doesn't require us to say only nice things about our competitors. 
    Paranoia will destroy 'ya.
        w_irving (as portrayed by clifford?)

    See note 1.1  (it certainly appears to me that "If you can't say
    something nice, then say nothing at all..." is the corporate Notes
    strategy.)    That is certainly safe, but sometimes inaccurate.
    
    RE: Third parties,  NIS (who?) has resellers agreements with Cisco,
    Cabletron, Synoptics, Chipcom, Vitalink, Dowty, AT&T, Anixter, and
    several other companies.  We have the capability to provide solutions
    where Digital's products don't fit, or where a customer RFP demands a
    specific vendor product.  Some vendors are easier to work with than
    others, which will always be the case.  Regardless of my personal
    opinion about the vendor's practices, I wouldn't tell 50,000 people
    that a vendor was "scum", in what amounts to a pseudo-public forum.
        
    RE .0     Hi Mike,  Yes, we do have a solution to offer....
    
    The new NIS 500/600 products should fit nicely with what the customer
    is looking for.  The NIS supports FDDI, T1, and Ethernet, and can route
    TCP/IP and DECnet and OSI.   There also are some very good competitive
    reasons to choose Digital.   Primary, that Cisco's implementation of
    inter-router protocols is proprietary (IGRP).  Digital uses IS-IS which is
    open, thereby not locking the use into only one vendor.  The language
    spoken by Digital on the Wide area media is open also (Point to Point
    Protocol) and not proprietary.
    
    To answer your questions:
    
    >> What makes translation better than encapsulation?
    
	  If a packet is encapsulated onto some media, then it must 
    	  be de-capsulated before it can be understood by the 
    	  receiving station.   If you have two proprietary boxes speaking
    	  a proprietary language, then any other station between those
          boxes cannot understand the traffic.  Cisco's encapsulation
    	  is not a standard.  Translation however, means that any packet
    	  is TRANSLATED into the native format of the media that it's
          running over.   This is good, because stations on the ring, can
    	  communicate with stations on the subnets.
    
    >> Is cisco still using encapsulation?  
    
    	  Cisco has indicated an intent to ship a translating Bridge
          product soon.  It would be in Cisco's better interest to keep
          selling products that keep the user coming back to them. 
          Therefore a proprietary encapsulating routine means that the
    	  customer can't buy a "fibronics" or "Digital" 10/100
    	  bridge/router if he already owns at least one Cisco.  
    
    
 >> DO they fully support IP fragmentation across their router family?
  
    Don't know...
      
    >> Am I better off with an NIS 600 or the DECbridge 600/500?
    
    The DECBridge 500/600 is only a bridge, and it won't speak T1.  
    The NIS is more in the class of the Cisco AGS+.   Per note .1, speak 
    with your local configuration people for more details about the 
    specific site.  
    
    >> What advantages do we have over cisco?
    
    Digital has a full suite of Networking products, Cisco is a router
    vendor.  We can offer a great deal of services and support.  Ask Cisco
    for a loaner product sometime, and see what they say...   Cisco
    however has managed to capture a very respectable portion of the router
    marketspace.   If their products are already in a site, it is very
    difficult to sell products that don't interoperate with Cisco's
    protocols, because the customer has to start "changing things" and that
    is painfull on a large network.
 
    >> The cisco rep has the customer believing cisco routing is standard
    >>  because it supports RIP and will therefore interoperate with
    >> other vendors routing. How does this relate to ISIS and is it true
    >> and if true how does it affect the performance of their bridge.
    
    Bridge's don't worry about RIP, because they don't route.  RIP is for 
    TCP/IP routers.  IS-IS is the language that standard multi-protocol 
    routers use to speak with each other.  Other routers that speak RIP could
    understand Cisco's TCP/IP Packets.  What about OSI, or Appletalk, that
    don't use RIP ??    All vendors will soon speak IS-IS.  Right now,
    Digital is the only vendor shipping it.
     
    >> Does cicso support single mode?
    
    Cisco doesn't have a card listed in my options book, for single mode. 
    But new products could have been announced.  They would probably use
    the 15-pin Ethernet port, and a single-mode optical transceiver for the
    connection, or the FDDI card, and an optical converter from MMF/SM. 
    They would not let a tiny thing like SMF stand between them and a sale.
    
    
    JR  (KB4FFE)

    re .6
    
    	Thank you for your flame.
    
    	I'll take the rest off line.
    
    								/Bill
    
    	PS Apparently we can ignore what is said in note 1.1 of this
    	   confernec form here forward.
    

An analogy I recently came up with for comparing translation with
encapsulation:

Think of passing a message along a number of people.  The originator writes
it in English.  Some of the people in the middle do not understand English,
so they can't handle the message.

Translation: at the appropriate point, translate the message into a language
understood by the middle people (say, French).  Later, translate it back
to English.

Encapsulation:  at that same point, put the message into a plain brown
envelope, with a forwarding address written on it in French, and "open me"
in English.

Results:

Translation: all along the way, everyone who handles the message can look at
it and understand it.

Encapsulation: as soon as the message has been wrapped, it can no longer
be seen.  The French-speakers can't communicate, they can only passively
carry the traffic.

Also: If I wrap messages in brown envelopes, but you only know how to open
blue envelopes, communication breaks down.  (This is the "encapsulation is
proprietary" problem.)

-------

Re .7, single mode: it's important to realize that a multi to single mode
converter is NOT a real substitute for a "native single mode" design!
The FDDI standard has been designed so that it is, with care, possible
to design mode converters that will work.  But not all possible designs
work, and it IS clear that the distance you will get is less than the
maximum distance of a "native" design.  If you're only going a moderate
distance, this doesn't matter.  But if you're pushing the distance limits,
go for the "real" solution.

I'm not at all surprised that .1 reports problems with converters on a
40 km link.  I would have been a lot more surprised if that configuration
had worked...

	paul