Networking many branches

[Guest.Visitor]

We have a customer that currently has 4 branches attached to thier AS400 over leased lines to 5294s (Yup, you read that right). They expect to see some signifigant growth and go to upwards of 30 remote sites. I would like to take this opportunity to get away from leased lines and perhaps go to frame relay. All remote sites arein a 50 mile radius. I am interested in fiding someone who has already been down this road to make a laundry list of AS400 equipment and network equipment required to do it. I would also be interested in anyone who has gone down the VPN road... Thanks! JC

[Guest.Visitor]

If you go frame you might want to look into a non-sna solution. Depending on the frame traffic you could have problems with timming out. (unless you want to pay the premium for proirity thru put). We have that problem now with 5494's. We are now testing some remote controllers that run IP to the controller and twinax to the devices, you can connect PC's with twinax adapter cards and run TCP/IP with no problems. So far they are working well.

[Guest.Visitor]

At another company I worked for we used Motorolla equipment for our frame network. The motorolla 6500 programmable routers will do SNA encapsulation over IP. It will also do emulation for both the server and client sides. This cuts down on network traffic tremondously. Apparently an SNA connection is always active with queries and responses, similar to "Are you there?" "Yes, I'm here." "Are you there?" "yes, I'm here". over and over. Motorolla will answer for the other side without having to send that over the network, and send only the needed data over the network. These programmable routers (and their smaller cousins that sit at the clieint sides) are very upgradable and maintainable. The main thing I like about them is that if you decide you want to use DSL instead of frame relay, you swap a few cards, make any needed changes, and you can do it. With the same equipment. I was looking at setting up 4 sites with a frame relay network and got quotes for a number of solutions, Micom, Cisco, Perle and Motorolla mainly. The second to lowest in cost was approximately $15,000 for setting up all 4 sites, and these would of been "fixed" at frame relay. For the Motorolla solution it was $5000 for all 4 sites, and I could mix and match all I wanted. These things will do TCP/IP, IPX, voice over IP, SNA, Frame Relay, DSL, ISDN, voice, will connect to PBXes, and so on. Get a quote for a Motorolla 6500 seriers programmable router and required hardware for connecting and I think you'll be pleasantly suprised. Regards, Jim Langston

[Guest.Visitor]

We put our 15 sites up on frame relay about a year ago. The AS400 communicates via the ethernet port with the sites. The equipment we needed were a Cisco 2501 router to go with the AS400 and 1 Perle 594e per site. The Telco provided the sites with DSU's. That was it for communications equipment. Of course, if the sites are going to implement a lan, we bought some ethernet hubs. In addition, to saving money from going from X.25 to frame relay, the sites now are part of the lan (well, they each have there own subnet.)