Epilogue Technology Introduces Courier, First OSPF Routing Source-Code Solution for OEMs.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 25, 1995--At NetWorld+INTEROP this week, Epilogue Technology Corporation of Albuquerque, N.M., will introduce a new family of standards-compliant, routing source-code products.

The first product in the family is Courier OSPF, a fully portable implementation of the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. With Courier, router vendors and hardware manufacturers who need to add routing protocols to their network devices can easily incorporate OSPF routing technology. The release of Epilogue's Courier marks the first time that OSPF has been offered as a commercially supported OEM solution.

The OSPF routing protocol is part of the TCP/IP protocol suite and is designed to accommodate routing in large enterprise networks. Using networking technology based on OSPF, it's possible to designate paths between network devices and facilitate load balancing for network traffic in large enterprise networks. The real advantages of OSPF are its scalability, and its ability to accommodate rapid changes in network topology by automatically rerouting traffic. OSPF is a very complex routing algorithm, and implementing it effectively has presented a challenge to router vendors, until now.

With the release of Epilogue's Courier, router manufacturers, network hardware vendors, and others who need to deploy routing protocols can now port OSPF to their own platforms, making it easy to bring OSPF-compatible solutions to market quickly and inexpensively. Courier is fully compliant with the OSPF standard defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including RFCs 1583, 1584, 1587, and 1765. It includes all the features that make OSPF most attractive as a routing protocol, including ways to reduce multicast routing traffic and simplify routing packet authentication.

"We currently license SNMP, TCP/IP, and RMON products embedded in products offered by more than 200 companies," noted David Preston, Vice President and General Manager of Epilogue. "Our OEM customers have come to expect sophisticated, standards-compliant technology from Epilogue Technology, and with the release of Courier we can now offer them the most sophisticated portable routing solution there is, OSPF. By licensing Courier, manufacturers can deliver state-of-the-art network routing technology without having to invest the man-years of effort required to develop the protocol or worry about standards-compliance -- that's the Epilogue advantage."

OSPF was written as the TCP/IP routing protocol that delivers shortest-path-first (SPF) routing within a single administrative domain or Autonomous System (AS). The advantage of using OSPF routing is that it supports speedy recovery from network topology changes while minimizing packet traffic to accommodate routing information. It also provides load-balancing for network traffic, and can calculate different paths for different IP services using the IP Type of Service (TOS) field in the data packet header.

The OSPF protocol is designed for data routing in large enterprise networks since there is no inherent limit on the size of an AS; in fact the complexity of OSPF makes it ill-suited for smaller networks. Administrative areas can be broken into separate administrative areas connected by a single logical backbone for inter-area and intra-area routing. Each administrative area is then connected using intra-area routing. The result is a hierarchical, fully scalable routing architecture.

Shortest-path-first (SPF) or link-state routing algorithms function differently from RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and other routing algorithms since SPF maintains its own database which represents the full network topology. Using information stored in the Topological Database, the algorithm calculates optimal routes for network traffic. By maintaining a continually updated Topographical Database or "map" of the network, OSPF routers can reroute data traffic as needed, so they recover quickly from topology changes or failures. Each router uses the SPF algorithm to calculate a shortest-path tree to all points with itself as root, thus determining the optimal next-hop router for each IP packet. Routers maintain the Topographical Database by sending and receiving multicast packets with a designated AS.

Epilogue's Courier OSPF solution implements the basic link-state algorithm. Courier allows for the definition of both Administrative Areas and Designated Routers. This substantially reduces the amount of multicast traffic required to exchange routing data, so OSPF routing information doesn't consume unnecessary network bandwidth. Courier also offers a simple method of authenticating routing packets. This alleviates problems that can arise when users inadvertently run OSPF processes on non-authorized machines.

Courier OSPF ANSI source code is available from Epilogue for $65,000, 30 days ARO and executed license agreement. The license fee includes a full year of support and free upgrades for the first 12 months.

Epilogue Technology Corporation is located at 11116 Desert Classic Lane, N.E., Albuquerque, NM 87111-7512; telephone: [phone]; FAX: [phone].

CONTACT: Woolf Media Relations, Inc.

Tom Woolf, 415/508-1554