*Motorola lowers DSU price point. (FT100M) (Lab Note) (PC Week Netweek) (Brief Article)
PC Week  Oct 24, 1994 v11 n42 pN11(1)
PC Week  Oct 24, 1994 v11 n42 pN11(1)

Motorola lowers DSU price point. (FT100M) (Lab Note) (PC
Week Netweek) (Brief Article)

by	Blakeley, Michael

Full Text
With the release in mid-September of its $2,695 FT100M, Motorola Inc.'s
Transmission Products Division has lowered the price bar for
SNMP-managed T-1 DSUs.

PC Week Labs found that the FT100M provided good manageability for
corporate WANs.

Capable of speeds from 56K bps to 1.544M bps, the FT100M also sports a
10BaseT Ethernet port for connection to an SNMP console. Internal
support for SNMP MIB-II allows corporate network managers to monitor
line state for the entire enterprise WAN from a central site. Similar
products from General DataComm Inc. and Digital Link Corp. cost $3,400
to $5,000.

PC Week Labs tested the FT100M's SNMP agent by adding it to a LAN with
a Hewlett-Packard Co. OpenView 7.2 for Windows console. Before
OpenView could connect to the FT100M, we had to use a VT100 terminal
to configure the DSU's IP address.

Once the IP address was configured, we were able to access the FT100M
from both Telnet and SNMP interfaces. A password can be applied to the
Telnet interface.

From the OpenView console, we were able to view MIB-II tables from
the DSU. However, MIB-II isn't telecom-aware, so no WAN information
was available until we compiled Motorola's private MIBs into OpenView.
This was a simple, if somewhat time-consuming, procedure.

Once OpenView had the Motorola MIBs available, we were able to query,
poll, and set alarms based on the DSU's activity, including hardware
resets and line state. Alarms based on line state should prove useful for
WAN administrators, who must often determine on which side of the
telco demarcation point their problems lie.

We tested the FT100M equipped with two RS-232C ports. V.35 and DS1
ports are also available. The package included a user's guide, power
supply, and a floppy disk with Motorola's private MIBs, but no data cables.

Physical placement of the FT100M may pose problems for some
networks. Many corporations aren't used to running 10BaseT to the DSU.
In addition, Motorola uses a wall-mounted power supply that covers two
to three AC ports at once. On the plus side, the FT100M is
rack-mountable.

Motorola's Transmission Products Division, of Huntsville, Ala., can be
reached at (205) 430-8000.

PC Week Labs tested ImageFast 2.0, from ImageFast Software Systems
Inc.; InText 1.0 for Windows, from Island Software Corp.; and Visual
Recall 1.01 for Windows, from XSoft (a division of Xerox Corp.) on a
low-end, 33MHz 386DX-based Dell Computer Corp. D333 computer with
8M bytes of system RAM to see how each package performed on the
minimum required hardware. We also installed each application on a
high-end, 90MHz Pentium-based Micron Computer Inc. P90PCI
PowerStation workstation with 32M bytes of system RA M and a
500M-byte hard drive. Microsoft Corp.'s Windows for Workgroups 3.11
was running on both computers. In addition to installing the applications
on the desktop machines, we installed them on a Novell Inc. NetWare
3.12 server.

To assess each program's full-text indexing and search capabilities, we
indexed and searched a 14-page test document. When timing these
operations, we used the high-end Micron machine. To evaluate InText's
summarizing tool, we used it on our test document as well as on several
other documents. To test the OCR (optical character recognition)
capabilities of ImageFast and Visual Recall, we used scanned TIFF
images of forms and text documents.


Company:	Motorola Inc.

Product:	Motorola FT100S (DSU/CSU)

Topic:	DSU/CSU
	Price Cutting

Record#	16 174 601

COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1994