A comparison of Enterprise Extender and DLSw

The table compares DLSw and Enterprise Extender.

Table 1. Comparison of Enterprise Extender and DLSw
DLSw	Enterprise Extender
DLSw requires significant router resources, in terms of CPU and storage. Data center routers, can be heavily loaded with DLSw connections.	Enterprise Extender on z/OS can reduce the data center router requirements because OSA-Express cards provide the conduit for IP and UDP traffic.
DLSw data center and branch endpoints provide an additional point of failure. Loss of the data center router (providing services for endpoints) results in session outages.	Enterprise Extender has the endpoint in z/OS Communications Server. IP reroutes around a failed data center router.
Does not fully support SNA session priority.	Enterprise Extender maps the SNA session priority to a set of UDP ports and the IP ToS field.
DLSw traverses the full SNA stack and TCP/IP stacks, requiring more resource and time to complete its data transfer.	Enterprise Extender supports only HPR and since HPR provides generally the same functions as TCP (reliable data transfer, error recovery and more), Enterprise Extender can use the unreliable UDP protocol.
Can use only fast ethernet (100 megabit OSA)	Exploits 1 gigabit OSA.
	Throughput and response time comparisons of Enterprise Extender and DLSw show Enterprise Extender outperforms DLSw.
	SNASw, together with branch extender, provides end-to-end Enterprise Extender connectivity using the existing IP WAN infrastructure.