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switches 2950 AND 3550 WITH SNA

beatrice.houbat
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

I have an ethernet network constitued with two 3550 as backbone switches and a number of 2950 as access switches . The network is running IP but i have to connect an IBM AS 400 running SNA . I have vo idea on how to configure my switches to have SNA on the network. I'll be gratefull if you could help me.

Kind regards

5 Replies 5

ywadhavk
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Only if you are doing L3 switching, you need to worry about getting the right image on the switch(rsm). But the above switches in question should not have that issue. The routers in the topology needs to be taken care of.

Hope that helps,

Yatin

The above answer is not entirely correct. Will research further and get back.

Sorry

Yatin

SNA traffic in your case is just layer 2 traffic. So it should be no different than any other switch config.

You can just configure all interface as L2 port and bridge it for your SNA traffic.

Hope that helps a bit. Let me know if you require any further help.

Thanks,

yatin

Beatrice,

As Yatin suggested, if you keep your SNA traffic in one VLAN it should work fine.

I would add, see if you can transition the application to TCP/IP somehow. I have had a lot of customers who have done this with their AS400's over the years, with much success. It keeps things simpler on the networking side.

If you must run SNA across VLANs, then you're probably looking at additional Cisco IOS routers running Data Link Switching (DLSw) or Data Link Switching Plus (DLSw+) to push the SNA traffic through IP tunnels, so it can bridge via the IP routed network. I have had a few customers do this because they couldn't keep all the SNA traffic in one VLAN, and did not want to bridge their VLANs. (They are looking into migrating the applications to IP, though.)

You could bridge SNA traffic between VLANs; but bridging non-routed traffic could end up passing a lot of undesirable traffic between VLANs. I suppose you could filter the bridged traffic so that only SNA traffic that gets bridged; but this would require detailed knowledge about SNA. I have done this for DEC LAT, which is also a non-routable protocol, and for DECNet; maybe there's a way to do it with SNA too. I just never had the chance to figure out how: every time I've run into SNA, it's been handled as outlined above (single VLAN, DLSW/DLSW+, or migration to TCP/IP).

Hope this helps.

Larry,

I am in a similar "predicament" as Beatrice. Can you please point me out to where I can read up on this stuff?

Thanks.