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Technologies that time forgot: 100VGAnyLan
Once-upon-a-time this LAN ran in the high speed networking race...

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Friday 23 November 2001

With the advent of server processors like Digital's Alpha and Intel's PCI internal bus technology in the early nineties, the network began to bottleneck at the hub, and sharing 10Mbps on an Ethernet LAN was simply not an option anymore.

The logical step was to rack up the bandwidth by, say, ten times?

100BaseT was the natural successor to 10BaseT, but to everyone's surprise AT&T, HP and IBM decided to rustle up a young pretender to the standard in 1995.

Dubbed VG(Voice Grade) AnyLan, HP et al boasted it would usher in a new way of networking for the multimedia age.

It was called AnyLan because it would run both Ethernet and IBM's baby, Token Ring. It would, it followed, allow network managers to migrate to the cheaper Ethernet, without having to junk heir Token Ring installed base.

It also boasted Demand Priority Media Access (DPMA) which would give a higher priority to specified traffic.

HP and its collaborators insisted that there was no 'holy war' and both VGAnyLan and 100BaseT, soon dubbed Fast Ethernet, could co-exist in the same world.

Sadly this proved not to be true, for while network managers flocked to Fast Ethernet to cater for user demands for bandwidth, they stayed away from VG AnyLan in droves.

AnyLan was cool but it was too far removed from the 802.3 Ethernet standard to justify ripping out a lot of installed base and upgrading to Category 5 structured cabling. It was not a practical solution.

Token Ring was fighting a losing battle and AnyLan's protocol flexibility proved an insufficient draw.

That left media prioritisation. Most companies struggled to find a reason to justify running bandwidth hungry applications which demanded continuous network access and so DPMA failed to become a selling point.

HP and its collaborators quietly forgot about breaking Ethernet's monopoly on the network and turned to simpler things like hardware and wide area services.

Meanwhile the network grew again, to 1Gbt and soon 10Gbt, DWDM, Fiber Channel, WiFi, Bluetooth....

Now it's your turn. If you used - or still use - VGAnyLan or rival, non-Ethernet technologies we want to hear from you. Or perhaps you sold (resold) products based on the network protocol. What are you memories? Has it rightly been thrown into the dustbin of history or is it another superior technology that lost out to an inferior rival with a bigger marketing budget? To have your say click 'Add Comment' below or email editorial@silicon.com

And if you know of a technology/product worthy of this column let us know

For related links, see
Technologies that time forgot: 3Com's 3+Open
http://www.silicon.com/a48721

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