BPCS Support Conceptual Expectations 4

The White Papers that gave me my vision of platform trade-offs included

D.H. Andrews Group (203) 271-1300 Fax (203) 272-8744
They have a bunch of publications on where the AS/400 is going, and how it
compares to LANs and networking on other platforms like UNIX & PC based

Whittman-Hart (800) 426-7767
They have an enormous number of documents, but the ones we have are related to
CISC vs. RISC and what the advantages of AS/36 have over other alternatives
for S/36

It was International Data Corporation that compared all the costs of computer
ownership & concluded in 1993 that AS/400 computers were usually less
expensive to operate than Unix or PC/Lan alternatives.  Some of the variables
analysed will change more rapidly than others, such as failure rate,
complexity of open systems, tech support, difficulty of fundamental MIS
operations, reliability, performance, non-obvious choices, ease of use for end
user, logical transition paths to alternatives.

But although I have all this info on platform vs. platform, I still do not
have a good picture of support & complexity for LAN running off of AS/400.
Currently, the corporate departments that decided for good reason to get PC
solutions for some applications, such as Payroll & Personnel & Auto Cad - they
have the secondary need to tie that together among co-workers in same
department in our 3 factories.

HR uses Carbon Copy to consolidate records at HQ & get the same story out to
each facility.

Accounting uses PC Anywhere to get at AS/400 when visiting a customer site.

One of our Engineering departments has a local Novel Lan so that different
offices can access the same Auto Cad info.

I do not know what QC is using, to get data between the 3 factories PCs - I
suspect diskettes in the mail.

Several of these hook-ups have PC printer sharing and Tape Backup sharing.
The latter is a vast improvement over some person walking a Tape Drive around
offices attaching it to Printer Ports.

Now I think that what we need is a LAN off of AS/400 locally, in addition to
the twinax support & off of a Perle at each remote site, in which the Perle
would have a couple of LAN ports and several simple twinax ports.  It is my
understanding, that depending on which option we use, and I am extremely vague
on this, not only would the PC users at each site have more efficient
interfaces with AS/400 than current emulation, due to less client hand-shake
overhead, but also from the perspective of purely PC applications, it could be
like all 3 factories are on the same LAN.

HR would not need Carbon Copy - all 3 sites would be on the same virtual LAN.
QC would not need to send diskettes in the mail - all 3 sites would be on the
same virtual LAN, able to access the same data, just like the Auto Cad
engineers.
The folks on the ABC project would be able to exchange data more easily, and
Quotes would flow between factories more smoothly than the current inter-
office snail mail.

I suspect this would require more disk space to support the PC stuff going
between PC users.  I do not know what performance hit it might do to our
AS/436 which I think is optimized for SSP & mixed mode ie. mixture of
interactive & batch.  I know there will be a staffing hit on MIS - I think it
will mean a reduction of staffing overall for the corporation, compared to HR
using outside consultants to keep Carbon Copy working.  But this overall is an
area I will be wanting to get more knowlegeable on, as my AS/400 knowlege
grows.

Al Macintyre
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