RSS  ATM NICs: Ready To Sail, But Not Ready To Scale Madge's installation procedure was straightforward, though the small manual led us from section to section with few examples and several references to later chapters in the booklet. Once we sifted through the material, installation was simple and trouble-free. The 32-bit ATMMgr management application let us view LAN Emulation (LANE) connection information once we had the drivers properly installed. The Madge drivers support Token-Ring and Ethernet Emulated LANs (ELANs), but lack Classical IP support. Complete Support System Madge was the only vendor to provide complete, across-the-board support for every major operating system, including NetWare 3.x and IntranetWare, NT 3.5 and 4.0, OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows95, Windows NT for PowerPC, and a unique ATM Hardware Specific Module (HSM) driver for native ATM applications under NetWare Multiprotocol Router. At $995 for the unshielded twisted pair (UTP) version and $1,095 for the fiber version, the Madge adapter fell into the midrange price point.
3Com Corp. ATMLink PCI 155- Mbps Net
work Interface Card
Installing the adapter was effortless under Windows NT and IntranetWare. The documentation for the adapter was well-written, and we had four adapters up and running in a matter of minutes. The card includes diagnostics for DOS as well as configuration and monitoring programs for Windows NT and IntranetWare.
Bandwidth Controls ATMLink also can control the amount of bandwidth an individual ELAN can use. This form of QoS is called traffic shaping. For example, you can configure your "Sales" ELAN to never use more than 20 Mbps from a particular server. Performance of the 3Com ATMLink was average, while CPU utilization was generally high. Under Windows NT, four ATMLink adapters maxed out at 117-Mbps average aggregate throughput, while under IntranetWare the maximum throughput was 114.63 Mbps. Per the adapter manual, the Net Ware driver does not support SMP at this time. The driver caused the server to crash if it was loaded with the NetWare SMP drivers installed.
FORE Systems ForeRunner PCA-200EPC PCI Bus ATM Adapter
The PCA-200EPC has excellent diagnostic utilities for NT and IntranetWare. A simple GUI interface tells you which adapters are connected to which LANE services and also lets you browse ATM statistical information that is cached on the card. The IntranetWare drivers were the only drivers we tested that supported and operated in the SMP IntranetWare environment. They also were the only drivers to take advantage of IntranetWare's native support for the PCI interface.
ATM Network Interface Cards Sun's 155- And 622-Mbps SBUS Adapters 
To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the 155-Mbps ATM NIC Features, click here.
Updated July 31, 1997 
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ATMLink is 3Com's second-generation ATM adapter. It includes driver support for Token-Ring and Ethernet LANEs, and also has built-in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support per the ATM SNMP NIC management information base (MIB), but it lacks support for Classical IP. Unlike Madge Networks' offering, ATMLink supports only NT and IntranetWare, but it hits the mark as a full-featured, high-performance NIC at a price that makes ATM attractive ($545 for the UTP version; $695 for the fiber).
The 3Com driver
suite includes support for Windows NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and IntranetWare. The driver also supports NetWare 3.x, however the manual addendum says using the card in the NetWare 3.x environment is "not recommended." In addition, the drivers support a backup option for fault-tolerant networks. If the primary
link to your NT or IntranetWare server goes down, a second card connected to another switch on the same ELAN will automatically take over, maintaining the connection to the network.
