Educational Consortium Provides Service to Member Districts with Barr's New ESCON Interface
PDF Version (68 KB)
More than 20 years ago, several school districts in Northeast Florida banded together to share limited resources. Today, with the help of Barr Systems, they are providing mainframe resources to nearly 2,000 users, 24-hours a day!
The North East Florida Educational Consortium (NEFEC) is a unique organization that was created with a goal of "service to member districts" to better serve children, teachers, and administrators. Nine school districts cooperate through the Consortium to reach goals and objectives they could not reach by acting alone.
The Consortium's Regional Information Center (NRIC) provides administrative computing and networking to its members. One of the NRIC cooperative efforts was the recent purchase of an IBM System/390 Multiprise 2000 mainframe computer. Once the mainframe was in place, NEFEC needed a reliable, high-speed connection to their many users. With the help of BARR/CHANNEL for SNA Server with ESCON and Microsoft SNA Server, they are now able to provide district-wide computing facilities along with services that include sophisticated student, human resource, and financial record management systems.
Founded in 1895, Kansas City Life today relies on an IBM 3090-400J MVS/ESA mainframe. Their network is 99% ethernet-based and runs TCP/IP and IPX. They use TCP/IP everywhere they can and IPX for some of their DOS clients.
"The BARR/CHANNEL adapter has worked flawlessly," Rodger Stamps, Systems Manager at NRIC said. "Barr Systems makes reliable hardware, offers great service, and they are easy to work with."
The Consortium was very satisfied with the performance of Barr's Bus & Tag connection they installed in 1996. Understanding the advantages of fiber-optic technology, the Consortium was pleased to learn that Barr offered the new ESCON interface for the BARR/CHANNEL for SNA Server product. With higher data transfer rates and improved connectivity with local and wide area networks, they've found it has greatly improved their communications service.
Stamps emphasized the importance of the ESCON connectivity to deliver strong performance. The host currently has two images and 300 LUs defined for the BARR/CHANNEL and SNA Server products, and typically 225 users are active at any one time. Two hundred and fifty of the LUs are setup for terminal emulation software (QWS 3270 PLUS) to communicate through the SNA Server to several different software packages on the host. At the same time they have assigned 50 LUs for their Lexmark 2450 Laser Printers.
North East Florida Educational Consortium was one of Barr Systems' initial test sites of the ESCON Service for the BARR/CHANNEL for SNA Server product. Barr's fiber-optic solution has proven to be very successful for both the Microsoft SNA Server and IBM Communications Server for Windows NT gateways.
|
