Determine the Vendors Involved

Another factor in determining the ultimate layout of your network is the equipment various vendors use to communicate.

Not all vendors provide every OSI service. A given vendor may only provide some subset of functionality for a given layer. For example, HP does not currently provide the Virtual Terminal service. Another vendor may not provide X.500. Or another vendor may provide a Network Management Agent, but have no facilities to manage the resources local to that node.

When planning your network, you need to take such factors into consideration. Listed below is a checklist of items you should investigate to help ensure your success.

Does the vendor provide this service?
If you wish to communicate with a piece of equipment, it must support the service. Access to mid-stack layers (Session, Transport) cannot be assumed just because a vendor provides a seven layer stack.
Does this service coexist with other facilities I want to use on this node?
Determine what effects installing this product has on the other operations of your system. Especially check on its coexistence with other non-OSI networking services you may be using.
What version of this service is provided?
Some standards are evolving. For example, Session provides both Version 1 and Version 2. Verify that the version supported is acceptable to all nodes of communication you intend to use.
What functional units of this service are provided?
Many OSI implementations are a subset of the full service. You should understand what facilities you require from this service and ensure that each vendor supports those.
What lower layer protocols does this product use? What versions are these? Can I use it over the link I want?
Verify that the underlying layers are compatible. The primary considerations are Session version and functional units, Transport Layer class, Network Layer protocol and link type. For more detailed questions about the links used, see "General LAN Questions" and "General X.25 Questions."
What is the interface to this product? Is it standardized? Does it meet my needs?
The interfaces to the OSI services can be broadly broken into two categories:
- interactive, where you type commands, or select choices from a menu
- programmatic, where you develop your own program (typically in C) using a set of OSI library commands
Support of a standard interface will increase the portability of your applications and make the transition from one platform to another simpler.
What level of conformance or interoperability testing has been achieved by this product?
Conformance testing indicates that an implementation has successfully passed a suite of tests against a reference OSI implementation. Such testing improves the chances that the implementation is correct and that it will interoperate with other conformant systems.
Interoperability testing is a direct test between two vendors' implementations.
Who will install, configure and test this product?
If you will not be doing the entire installation yourself, you should coordinate with the other individuals involved. HP provides a remote system worksheet that you can use to gather information for these other systems. See chapter 4.

Determine the Vendors Involved

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