Subject: AIW 9 Meeting Minutes Highlights

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 95 13:43:50 EST

Sender: "Charles H. Brotman (919-254-7204)" <[email-masked]>
Subject: AIW 9 Meeting Minutes Highlights

 ADVANCED PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKING (APPN) IMPLEMENTERS' WORKSHOP
 ==============================================================

                   AIW 9 -- MEETING MINUTES
                   ========================

                         OVERVIEW
                         ========

The ninth meeting of the APPN Implementers' Workshop (AIW) was held
in Raleigh, North Carolina at the North Raleigh Hilton from October
31, 1995 through November 2, 1995.  The AIW facilitates fully
interoperable, high quality APPN products from a wide variety of
vendors.  Over one-hundred people representing twenty-three
companies attended this meeting.  This AIW included plenary
speakers and working sessions.  The working sessions consisted of
Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Related Interest Groups (RIGs), and
Birds Of a Feather sessions (BOFs).

The major topics of the working groups at this meeting were High
Performance Routing (HPR) native access to ATM, Border Node, the
APPN Management Information Base (MIB) and Data Link Switching
(DLSw) scalability.  Our plenary sessions included an "Industry
Perspective" by Nick Francis of Cisco Systems, an "APPN
Implementation Experience" by Sandy Smart of Memorex-Telex, and a
discussion of APPN and Frame Relay by consultant Atul Kapoor.  The
APPN Reference SIG and the Validation BOF met, and we had a report
on the successful, seven vendor DLSw V1 Interoperability Test by
Allen Goldberg of Bay Networks.  Don Andrews, of IBM, demonstrated
and discussed IBM's APPC/APPN Configuration Tool, currently
accessible on the World Wide Web.

These minutes provide an overview of the activities of this AIW
meeting.  Look for more detailed meeting minutes of the various
sessions on their respective AIW mail exploders, either now or
in the near future.

                         HIGHLIGHTS
                         ==========

The HPR SIG - HPR/ATM Synergy
-----------------------------

AIW members saw progress in moving the HPR native access to ATM
architecture towards final approval.  The document, written by IBM,
received Approved Direction (AD) this week.  This is an
important milestone because it provides SNA customers the best
method of interfacing their applications to ATM.  It marries
ATM-ready applications (SNA) with the industry-acknowledged best
networking architecture (HPR) with the best new hardware technology
(ATM).

APPN's sophisticated "Connection Network" technology is a ready-made
solution to the problem of optimal ("zero-hop") campus routing; this
problem is currently a focus of the ATM Forum's Multi-Protocol Over ATM
working group.  While all existing SNA and APPN run well over ATM LAN
Emulation and ATM-Frame Relay interworking, HPR native access is
preferred because it maps SNA's Class of Service to ATM's Quality of
Service, applies APPN's Connection Networks to address resolution and
zero-hop routing, and employs HPR's ARB and RTP to optimally utilize
ATM's high speed, high quality, connection-oriented links.

MPOA
----

On a related topic, the AIW discussed providing SNA content to the
ATM Forum's MPOA working group.  Andre Fredette, of IBM and a
participant the MPOA working group, gave a tutorial on the current
state of the MPOA objectives and specification.  The AIW plans to
create a liaison with the ATM Forum to identify and develop
synergies with the still-evolving MPOA.  The AIW will send a note
to the ATM forum leadership to help establish this liaison with the
MPOA group and to help determine what other ATM subgroups might
benefit from such a relationship.

MIBs
----

Several Management Information Base (MIB) working groups meet
regularly at the AIW, including the AIW's APPN and HPR MIB SIG and
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) SNA Network-Accessible
Unit (NAU) MIB.  The participants worked to standardize the
IBM-developed APPN MIB and obtained AD status at this meeting.
The HPR MIB had received AD status at AIW 8 in August 1995.  The
group will continue to work on the APPN and HPR MIBs and plans to
work closely with the IETF MIB working group to ensure rapid
standardization in both the AIW and IETF standards bodies.  The
AIW and IETF group chairs expect to have joint meetings of the
two groups to help streamline this process.

Border Node
-----------

AIW members reviewed the draft of IBM's extended border node
specification, which will allow the construction of efficient APPN
internetworks of unlimited size.  Approval of the border node document
is expected next year.

APPN Reference SIG
------------------

The APPN Reference SIG, charged with enhancements and maintenance
of APPN architecture, approved several minor enhancements and
fixes.  There was further discussion of a proposal made by Wall
Data and InSession Pty., Ltd. to extend APPN directory services to
non-SNA resources, making APPN networks more hospitable for
applications.  Volunteers from Network Node implementers are
needed to help with this proposal.  Please contact Dave Finnie of
Insession or Ron Sanders of Wall Data, to participate.

Data Link Switching RIG:
------------------------

Late breaking news (too late for the AIW business session) is that
the DLSw scalability proposal by Dave Bryant of 3Com and Mike
Redden of Proteon was granted Approved Direction status by the DLSw
RIG.

                         CONCLUDING REMARKS
                         ==================

State of the AIW
----------------

The focus of many of the discussions at this AIW appeared somewhat
different than past AIWs.  At the first few AIWs (circa 1993) the
emphasis was on education -- "What is this stuff?  Why should I be
interested?".  More recently (1994 through early 1995) discussions
revolved around implementation -- "How do I do this?  Why does it
work this way".  While the implementation aspects are still there,
we observed that much of the talk had to do with deployment -- "I
was installing an APPN network at my customer's site and ...", etc.
I find this an encouraging sign that APPN is now poised to begin
its fair share of commercial success.  Keep up the good work!

Thanks
------

As always, there are many people who helped make the AIW a success.
Our thanks go out to the plenary and SIG speakers:  Nick Francis,
Sandy Smart, Allen Goldberg, Andre Fredette, Atul Kapoor, and
Don Andrews, as well as to the SIG, RIG, and BOF Chairs and
technical contributors.  Also, we thank the AIW Production Team of
IBMer's including:  Ed Tremblay, Marcia Peters, Barb Sampair, Gary
Schultz, and Ralph Case, with help from Ray Bird, Bob Moore, Gary
Dudley, Candy Elder, Peter Gayek, Andy Barclay, Wendy Arnette,
and Susan and Audrey Venderbush.  The efforts of some of these
people were more visable to you than others, but all helped to
make the AIW the success it was.  Thanks to all of them, and
to all of the other AIW members and attendees.

Web Access reminder
-------------------

You can reach the AIW's World Wide Web Home page at Universal
Resource Locator "http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/app/aiwhome.htm."  The
AIW Home page has a wealth of APPN and AIW and information,
including documents, mail logs, registration information, and
meeting minutes.

Next Meeting
------------

Lastly, AIW 10 will be held in downtown San Jose, CA, the week of
March 25, 1995.  I look forward to seeing y'all then.

                          Best Regards for Safe and Happy Holidays,
                          Chuck Brotman
                          AIW Chair