Novell NetWare® MultiProtocol Router and NetWare for SAA - Performance of Internetworked SNA

Sponsor: Novell, Inc

All Reports Sponsored by this Vendor

Document Number: 5276

Publication Date: 7/30/1995

Page Count: 4

Abstract

Given the installed base of SNA, it is not surprising to find that thousands of companies rely on SDLC connections to provide connectivity between far-flung branch offices and headquarters. Unfortunately, customers using such connections cannot readily take advantage of applications that run over routable protocols such as IPXTM and IP.

While customers have requirements for such applications, many are reluctant to migrate for fear of comprising the performance of their SNA applications. Novell commissioned The Tolly Group to quantify the performance of 3270 SNA traffic running in both SNA/SDLC and routed environments using Novell’s NetWare BranchLink Router 3.0 (the two port version of the NetWare MultiProtocol Router 3.0) and NetWare for SAA 2.0.

The results of 3270 file transfer tests show that, when 3270 sessions are routed using IPX, performance actually improves over native SDLC. Furthermore, Novell’s NetWare MultiProtocol Router compression provides additional performance, which dramatically increases throughput over SDLC as seen in the NetWare BranchLink Router scenario (see figure 1). With compression enabled, the performance of 1 Logical Unit (LU) was 56.19 Kbit/s and 40.45 Kbit/s respectively, for a download and upload, compared with 36.75 Kbit/s and 28.23 Kbit/s, respectively, for native SDLC (see figure 1). This represents up to a 52.8% improvement.