Subject: AIW 7 Minutes

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 95 17:53:48 EDT

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Meeting Minutes from the Seventh Meeting of the
Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking (APPN) Implementers Workshop
(AIW-7)
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AIW 7 was held at the Red Lion Hotel, in San Jose, California from
Monday, May 1, 1995 through Thursday, May 4, 1995.  There were 110
attendees representing 27 companies.

Monday, Day 1, was tutorial day.  There were introductory tutorial
sessions on base APPN, Dependent Logical Unit Requester (DLUR), High
Performance Routing (HPR), APPN Network Management, Data Link Switching
(DLSw), and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).  Also presented were
advanced tutorials on APPN Topology and Route selection Services (TRS),
Data Link Switching, APPN Directory Services (DS), and HPR.

The DLSw Related Interest Group (DLSw RIG) met throughout the conference,
starting on Monday.  The RIG started work on DLSw Version 2, and
continued work on the DLSw MIB.  More detailed minutes should become
available on the DLSw mail exploders.  Additionally, the SNA DLC MIB RIG
met until the wee hours of Monday evening.

Plenary sessions started on Tuesday morning.  Consultant Tom Routt of
Vedacom shared with us his view of the ATM technologies and market
driving forces.  Besides giving a great presentation, Tom announced that
he was changing his name to Tom Switch, to commemorate the changing
networking paradigm.  (It was just a joke, folks...)

Continuing with the ATM theme, Jim Fletcher of IBM spoke about creating
synergy between APPN and ATM.  Jim outlined a three-phased approach with
increasing degrees of use of ATM's special features (e.g., QOS).  This
served as a good entree to the ATM BOF which met later in the week.

Gene Cox of IBM gave a presentation detailing IBM's implementation of
Frame-Relay Boundary Access Node (FR-BAN).  Gene's talk was informative
and persuasive; for example, he succeeded in convincing a roomful of
technical folks that BIGGER is not as big as BIG.

Tuesday afternoon continued with a working session for the APPN Reference
SIG.  At this AIW there was more active participation in the Reference
SIG than ever.  Look to the Reference SIG's mail exploder for more
details.

There were separate BOF meetings Tuesday and Wednesday nights to look at
the APPN and HPR MIBs.  The decision was made to combine them into one
working group and form a SIG.  Rich Daugherty (IBM) has agreed to serve
as the Chair of this group with Bob Moore (IBM) and Bob Clouston (Cisco)
acting as editors.

On Wednesday morning, Anson Chen and Dario Calia from Cisco shared their
APPN implementation experiences with the other AIW members.  They talked
about their source code from IBM (base APPN and HPR) and from DCL (DLUR)
and the integration of this code and function.

After that, Dave Bryant, 3Com's Director of SNA Internetworking, gave us
his perspective on APPN, the industry, and the AIW.  Dave's frank
talk generated a lot of lively discussion and many good ideas for
possible new activities for AIW members.

IBM's Bob Moore presented a proposal for SNMP over SNA, using SNA as a
native transport for SNMP flows.  The subsequent BOF continued the
discussion.  The proposal was slated for approval at the end of May.
<<Note from the AIW chair:  The approval period has ended and Bob has
incorporated changes based on the comments received on the mail exploder.
Bob indicated that the document is ready for approval. The Reference
SIG Chair has read the consensus as indicating approval and the AIW Chair
concurs. - Good work Bob!>>.

At the AIW Business meeting, AIW Chair Chuck Brotman led discussions on
AIW documentation, policies, and activities including:  AIW procedures
and technical plan updates; AIW policy regarding the press (consensus of
members is still against inclusion of the press at the AIW meetings);
technical demonstrations (little interest); customer speakers; future
AIWs, etc.  Ed Tremblay discussed the AIW World Wide Web home page, AIW
mail exploder and document repositories and other Internet-related
topics.  Ed made a special request for AIW member companies to put links
to the AIW home page, offering a reciprocal link as incentive.

Dave Ogle of IBM gave a tutorial on MPTN and followed up with a BOF
Session.  The rest of Wednesday afternoon was devoted to the continuing
work of the APPN Reference SIG and DLSw RIG.

Thursday morning started with two relatively new BOFs, ATM and Border
Node, and the well established Validation BOF.  In the ATM BOF, Gary
Dudley (IBM) led the discussion of requirements for synergy between APPN
and ATM.  There was a lot of interest from many AIW members in developing
a standard architecture for APPN over ATM.  Gary indicated that IBM
intends to submit a proposal.  The Border Node BOF began with a tutorial
from Roy Brabson (IBM).  Ed Tremblay (IBM) went on to create a schedule
and description of deliverables and to request SIG status.  The
Validation BOF chaired by Roger Bess (IBM) plans to create a SIG for
Test Suites at AIW 8 (August '95).

The HPR SIG met Thursday afternoon and after extensive discussion came to
a consensus to promote the architecture to Closed Pages status.  See
the HPR mail exploder for more details.  The HPR SIG will stay intact
until AIW 8 at least as participants look at potential follow-on
work items and creating a new charter.

The closing session heard reports from each of the SIGs, RIGs, and BOFs.
Notable events ratified at this time were:
        -  Creation of the APPN and HPR MIBs Special Interest Group.
        -  Creation of the Border Node Special Interest Group.
        -  Acceptance of an updated AIW Procedures Manual and
           Technical Plan.
        -  Conferral of Closed Pages (CP) and "Architecture of Record"
           upon HPR.

More detailed information on many of the above mentioned SIGs, RIGs,
and BOFs is or will be available on their respective mail exploders.

On a personal note, I'd like to again thank all the people who made this
AIW a success:  Conference Coordinator Susan Venderbush; Technical
Coordinator Gary Schultz; the AIW team and other IBMers who spent their
time planning for and working at the AIW; invited speakers; the tutorial
givers; SIG, RIG, and BOF chairs and editors; technical consultants; and
most importantly all the AIW members and attendees.  Our initial feedback
indicates that we have outdone ourselves again, making this the best AIW
to date.  While I don't want us to break our arms whilst patting
ourselves on the back, I am very pleased with our continually evolving
and improving conference.  I hope that we all can keep contributing to
continue that trend.

To that end, we are in the process of evaluating the valuable feedback
you, the AIW members, have provided.  Based on that feedback, we have
already begun working on AIW-8, which will be held in Raleigh, NC on
August 21st through 24th.  I hope to see y'all there.

Sincerely,
Chuck Brotman - AIW Chair