Subject: Competition for RSVP?

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 09:20:30 +0100

Anybody know what's going on here?

"Communications Week reports that Bay Networks has teamed up with 
InVision Systems and Syzygy Communications (both software developers) 
to provide ATM-like quality-of-service features over router-based, IP 
internetworks.  According to the article, the new protocols are 
designed for transporting multimedia across packet networks but are 
technically controversial.
(Communications Week, February 6, 1995, p23)"
[quoted from Madge ATM news digest, February 9, 1995]

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Henning Schulzrinne    email: [email-masked]
GMD-Fokus              phone: +49 30 25499 182
Hardenbergplatz 2      fax:   +49 30 25499 202
D-10623 Berlin         URL:   http://www.fokus.gmd.de/htbin/info/step/hg
s

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From: Steve Jackowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 1995 08:33:51 -0800 (PST)

Henning,

If you check the January 30th InfoWorld, you'll find a 
more accurate description of what's going on.  

I can't really speak officially for Bay Networks, but on 
behalf of Syzygy, I can say that our offering is NOT 
competitive with RSVP.

Syzygy has seen immediate market requirements for 
resource reservation in Local and Wide-Area Networks.  
Our customers want to add multimedia to their nets and 
are finding it impossible to mix and police traffic 
without resource reservation and proper scheduling.

Syzygy is currently offering ST-2 capability in our 
product.  However our next release will have some RSVP 
content (we're working with RSVP now) and as soon as RSVP is 
ready, we'll be implementing it fully across platforms and 
making it and ST-2 transparent to the user: the market 
tells us there is a need for both scaling, target-initiated 
reservations IP (RSVP) and control (origin) oriented 
streaming protocols (ST-2).  We're also pushing the use of 
reservations (either RSVP or ST-2) to allow workstations 
to communicate their QoS and bandwidth requirements to 
backbone ATM switches.  

We don't have any biases towards either RSVP or ST-2.  
The biases we've seen appear to be political, and we're 
focused on market requirements (to survive as a 
business), not politics.   We want to make 
the market aware of reservation and policing technologies 
and show real users how to implement them  to effectively 
manage network usage of both high and low bandwidth 
applications.  

Note also that we're actively involved in creating a 
MIB for reservations that is protocol independent, and in 
trying to learn from ST-2 experience in the RSVP flowspec 
implementation.

Again, from our perspective, and the way we're explaining 
it to our customers, ST-2 is control-oriented and 
available now, but is not as scalable as RSVP. In our 
products, we  make the actual protocol transparent to them 
so that migration to RSVP is transparent as well. 
Customers are buying reservation, policing, and 
streaming.  They want functionality not protocols. And 
Syzygy certainly doesn't want to fight any protocol wars. 

If you check with Bay Networks, I think you'll find a 
similar philosophy.

Steve (Jackowski)
CTO, Syzygy Communications, Inc.

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From: [email-masked] (John Krawczyk)
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 17:00:34 EST

Speaking with no official capacity.....

As Steve J. said, I would not interpret the fact that we (Bay)
implemented ST-2 to mean that we plan to push it as opposed to RSVP.
It's just part of an overall strategy.  We remain committed to
implementing and helping to refine RSVP.

-jj