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As ATM slowly builds momentum, you may be feeling the pressure to at least start experimenting with this technology. Some have been experimenting with it for the past year or so and are starting to implement ATM production networks. Whatever your situation, you may be wondering what you're going to do to ensure that your network runs smoothly enough to take full advantage of ATM's capabilities. An ATM analyzer may be just what you need.
Until recently, most ATM analyzers have been geared toward developers needing to simulate and test various ATM events at the bit level. But as ATM migrates to mainstream networks, there's a greater need to perform troubleshooting at higher network levels. The products that we evaluated reflect the transition: They all have simulation capabilities except for the Network General Sniffer, which should have this feature by the time this review goes to print.
Due to the immaturity of ATM products and standards, simulation capabilities still are useful for implementers who just want to build off-the-shelf products, especially if they plan on mixing vendors. Simulation capabilities can be deployed to simulate things like the most recent version of UNI or NNI signaling to test a vendor's compliance. Simulation also can be used to evaluate the ability of an an ATM switch's to perform worst-case scenarios of processor-intensive tasks such as call setups.
You also may need to use an ATM analyzer for more basic troubleshooting tasks such as monitoring for errors on the physical and data-link layers. In some respects, this is no different than what you would do with an Ethernet or FDDI analyzer. On the other hand, you will have a whole new set of protocols and associated errors to learn about before you will be able to understand their significance. Even if you don't yet have ATM in a production network, the sooner you get hold of an analyzer and start observing how it works, the more confidence you will have when it's time to go in and troubleshoot a real problem.
Help Where You Need It Of course, just because you implement ATM doesn't necessarily mean that network problems related to slow file servers and misbehaving client software will go away. What are you going to do...