Re: Digital Terminal Servers/Network Access Servers.

Richard Lachance ( richard@vircom.com )
Thu, 05 Mar 1998 03:01:09 -0500

At 01:11 3/05/98 -0500, you wrote:
>It is true that you can only have 2 PRI/T1 connections per PM3 chassis, but
>you can put several PM3 Chassis together in a rack and have them work
>effectively as one "unit". This even allows MultilinkPPP connections that
>span chassis.
>
>I don't know what sort of "scalablity" you are looking for, but it would
>seem that the PM3's can handle it.

Perhaps it's the situation we're in that's giving us second thoughts about
the PM3... We're not a big ISP (and that's because it isn't our primary
business - we write software for ISP for a living; our ISP operation is
just an alpha test site for our products) and we don't have enough lines to
fill two PM3s, but enough so that one PM3 is not enough.

At that scale, purchasing a second unit to use it at less than half its
capacity seems like a hefty overhead. If we had enough dial-ups to fill 5
PM3s, then the equation would be quite different.

So, we are looking for a decent & stable NAS that could handle around 60
"lines", without too much of an overhead... Is there such a beast?

Regards,

Richard.

Vircom, Inc. - Innovative software solutions for the Online/ISP industry.