Banyan VINES

Banyan VINES (for Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) was a computer network operating system and the set of computer network protocols it used to talk to client machines on the network. The Banyan company based the VINES operating system on Unix, and the network protocols on the archetypical Xerox XNS stack. VINES formed one of a group of XNS-based systems which also included Novell NetWare and ARCNET; like most of these earlier products, it has since disappeared from the market, Banyan along with it.

James Allchin, who has since worked as Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft Corporation until his retirement at January 30th 2007, worked as the chief architect of Banyan VINES.

VINES ran on a low-level protocol known as VIP, the VINES Internetwork Protocol: essentially identical to the lower layers of XNS. Addresses consisted of a 32-bit address and a 16-bit subnet, which mapped onto the 48-bit Ethernet address in order to route to machines. This meant that, like other XNS-based systems, VINES could only support a two-level internet.

However, a set of routing algorithms set VINES apart from other XNS systems at this level. The key differentiator, ARP (Address Resolution Protocol), allowed VINES clients to automatically set up their own network addresses. When a client first booted up it broadcast a request on the subnet asking for servers, which would respond with suggested addresses. The client would use the first to respond, although the servers could hand off "better" routing instructions to the client if the network changed. The overall concept very much resembled AppleTalk's AARP system, with the exception that VINES required at least one server, whereas AARP functioned completely "headlessly". Like AARP, VINES required an inherently "chatty" network, sending updates about the status of clients to other servers on the internetwork.

Rounding out its lower-level system, VINES used RTP (the Routing Table Protocol), a low-overhead message system for passing around information about changes to the routing, and ARP to determine the address of other nodes on the system. These closely resembled the similar systems used in other XNS-based protocols. VINES also included ICP (the Internet Control Protocol), which it used to pass error-messages and metrics.

At the middle layer level, VINES used fairly standard software. The unreliable datagram service and data-stream service operated essentially identically to UDP and TCP on top of IP. However VINES also added a reliable message service as well, a sort of hybrid of the two that offered guaranteed delivery of a single packet.

At the topmost layer, VINES provided the standard file and print services, as well as the unique StreetTalk, likely the first truly practical globally-consistent name-service for an entire internetwork. Using a globally distributed, partially replicated database, StreetTalk could meld multiple widely-separated networks into a single network that allowed seamless resource-sharing. It accomplished this through its rigidly hierarchical naming-scheme; entries in the directory always had the form item@group@organization. This applied to user accounts as well as to resources like printers and file servers.

VINES client-software ran on most PC-based operating systems, including MS-DOS and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows. It was fairly light-weight on the client, and hence remained in use during the later half of the 1990s, when many machines not up to the task of running other networking stacks then in widespread use. This occurred on the server side as well, as VINES generally offered good performance even from mediocre hardware.

By the late 1990s this performance edge became irrelevant and then disappeared, as VINES could use a maximum of only 96 MB of RAM and a single processor due to its aging SVR3 underpinnings, preventing it from taking advantage of newer hardware. VINES sales rapidly dried up, both due to these problems, as well as the rapid rise of Windows NT. Banyan increasingly turned to StreetTalk as a differentiator, eventually porting it to NT as a stand-alone product, and offering it as an interface to LDAP systems.

Banyan eventually re-formed in 1999 as ePresence, a general Internet services company. This didn't fare very well either, and after a series of failed ventures it finally sold its services division to Unisys in late 2003 and liquidated its remaining holdings in their Switchboard.com subsidiary.