OSI/FTAM Programming Reference Manual

HP NonStop OSI/FTAM Programming Reference Manual—528611-001
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Conformance and Interoperability
This section presents information about the conformance to standards and the
interoperability of the NonStop FTAM initiator.
Conformance is the satisfaction of the requirements of the applicable standards,
consistent with the capabilities stated in the protocol implementation conformance
statement (PICS) for the implementation. Interoperability is the ability of an
implementation of a standard to work with other implementations of the same standard
to deliver services.
A list of the international standards and agreements that apply to NonStop FTAM is
provided in About This Manual.
These topics are covered in this section:
Conformance
To be ISO FTAM-conformant, an FTAM implementation must comply with the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) FTAM standard for communication
between different FTAM implementations. Conformance to the ISO FTAM standard is
tested in the areas of the support of services, functional units, service classes, and file
attributes.
Conformance testing increases the probability that an implementation can work with
other implementations. Two or more implementations are more likely to work together
when they conform to the same set of standards.
The NonStop OSI/FTAM product has been tested to conform with ISO 8571, NIST
Special Publication 500-162 (Stable Implementation Agreements for Open Systems
Interconnection Protocols), Part 9–FTAM Phase 2, and US GOSIP version 1.0.
Interoperability
Interoperability, or interworking, is the ability of two implementations to communicate
using FTAM primitives in a useful and meaningful way. While conformance to ISO
FTAM is necessary, it does not by itself guarantee that two implementations will
interwork. Even if the two implementations conform to the same OSI protocol standard,
they might be incapable of interworking with each other for reasons outside the scope
of that standard (see ISO IS 9646-1, section 5.7.2).
In addition, the FTAM standard is very complex. Two implementations might contain
disjoint subsets of the standard that do not allow for interoperability but are fully
Topic Page
Conformance
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Interoperability 2-1