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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: raymond marcotte who wrote (107)	11/14/1997 8:52:00 AM
From: Nine_USA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

New Net seen pulling together voice, data, video November 10, 1997, Issue: 980 By George Leopold Arlington, Va. - The architects of the follow-on to the Internet said last week that they hope to dismantle the barriers among voice, data and video networks and to merge those applications into a souped-up version of today's "commodity" public network. The Next Generation Networks conference here focused on how emerging network technologies are being deployed and how they are being paired with new applications, ranging from videoconferencing to IP multicasting. Driving much of the technology and standards debate is the emergence of so-called quality-of-service issues as network congestion slows response times. "The Internet is growing up," said Fred Baker, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force and senior software engineer for Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "Expect to see the vendors and backbone providers growing up as well." The maturation process is taking several forms. Government, industry and university efforts are now under way to build prototypes of a future Internet that is envisioned as offering 1,000 times the speed performance of the current Internet. There are also efforts to improve the performance of key components, such as servers, routers and backbones, while discovering new applications that will hasten the convergence of today's data, voice and video networks. Two efforts to upgrade the Internet-the government-sponsored next-generation Internet initiative and the university-led Internet 2-provided a framework at the conference for pushing networking technology forward while addressing performance shortfalls. Both efforts focus on prototype technology development that will eventually be disseminated to industry, developers here said. The initiatives will also support development of next-generation video and voice applications, such as interactive and distance learning and digital libraries, conference participants said. Despite efforts to drive networking technologies forward, some underlying technologies are expected to persist. For example, according to Cisco's Baker, the ubiquitous Internet Protocol won't be replaced anytime soon by asynchronous transfer mode or similar technologies. At the same time, emerging compression technologies, such as MPEG, are expected to play a critical role in such video-networking applications as broadband routing. Revolution brewing "The broadcast industry is undergoing a video-networking revolution similar to the data-networking revolution that other industries entered 10 years ago," said James Olson, president of Skystream Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.). "But interoperable, standard, flexible MPEG video networking solutions do not yet exist. "This is creating a sizable opportunity for new networking innovations, equipment types and even new companies." Olson predicted that next-generation multimedia networks will be a mix of IP, ATM and MPEG technologies. "The relevant questions [aren't] which one will prevail," he said, "but how they should best be combined." Similarly, next-generation server networks are being tailored to handle and store vast amounts of data and video in the multi-terabyte range, industry experts said. Relying heavily on Fibre Channel and other physical network technology, developers are striving to ease the transition to streaming video over the Internet-or what Marc Friedmann, president of Prisa Networks (San Diego), called "networked video." The migration path will be from legacy video production to "network-based computer-video creation and production" over the Internet, Friedmann said.