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Leo A. Wrobel
Operating standards for LANs offer certain advantages for keeping expenses for procurement, maintenance, and support under control At the same time, any standards must enhance, not stifle, the productivity of users of local area networks. This chapter reviews the basics to include in a LAN standards document.
The following scenario is common in many organizations: There are 200 local area networks (LANs) located across the country, in everything from small sales offices with a handful of people to regional distribution centers. The company does not know if these outlying locations handle mission-critical data or not. The company does not know with certainty who is running these LANs, because it ranges from office managers and clerical employees right up to seasoned IS professionals. A site that once had 10 salespeople now has 9 salespeople and a LAN administrator. The company does not know how these sites are buying equipment, yet it is reasonably sure that they are paying too much, because they are not buying in bulk or enjoying any economies of scale in equipment purchases.
Locations are beginning to lean on IS for help desk support because there is no way they can keep up with the rapid proliferation of hardware, platforms, software, and special equipment being installed in the field. The telecommunications department is worried about connecting all of these locations together.
Although some attempts at standardization of these locations may be made, invariably, LAN managers in the field consider standards to be an attempt by the IS department to regain control of the LAN administrators environment. Because LAN managers seldom have had any input into what these standards would be, they were soundly rejected.
Exhibit 1. Operational and Maintenance Characteristics
Operational Characteristics | |
MAINFRAME | LAN |
---|---|
Stodgy | Seat-of-Pants Approach |
Stoic | Close to Business |
Regimented | Happy, Productive Users |
Inflexible | |
Stifles Productively | |
Maintenance Characteristics | |
MAINFRAME | LAN |
Highly Advanced Support Systems | Evolving Support Systems |
High-Level Help Desk Support | Difficult Help Desk Support |
Reliable and Well-Proven | High User Involvement in Routine Problems |
High Support-to-Device-Ratio | Low Support-to-Device Ratio |
High Maintenance | |
Today, there are literally thousands of companies fighting this same battle. This chapter gives some solutions to these problems. First, however, it is important to understand why standards are required and how IS can implement standards without stifling productivity or adversely affecting the organization.
Exhibit 1 compares two distinctly different operating environments: mainframes and LANs. To illustrate a point, Exhibit 1 uses the same adjectives that LAN and mainframe people use to describe each other.
In an ideal environment, the LAN administrator can select exactly the type of equipment best tailored to do the job. LAN managers are historically close to the core business. For example, if the company is involved in trading stock, the LAN operations department can go out and buy equipment tailored exactly to trading stock. If the organization is engaged in engineering, the LAN administrator can buy equipment exactly tailored to engineering.
From the standpoint of operational characteristics, LANs are far more desirable than mainframes because they are closer to the business, they empower people, and they make people enormously productive by being close to the core business. This is not the whole story, however. It is equally important to support LANs once they are in place. This is where the trade-offs come in.
Because mainframes have been around so long, there is a high degree of support available. When users in the mainframe environment call the help desk with a hardware or a software problem, the help desk knows what they are talking about. Help desk staff are well trained in the hardware and the software packages and can quickly solve the users problems.
As another example, in an IBM 3070 terminal environment, 100 terminals or more could be supported by a single technician. When those terminals became PCs, the ratio perhaps dropped to 50 PCs per technician. When those PCs became high-end workstations, the ratio dropped even further. The value of a mainframe level of technical support cannot be underestimated.
Mainframe professionals had 20 years to write effective operating and security standards. These standards cover a number of preventive safeguards that should be taken in the operational environment to assure smooth operation. These range from:
In the mainframe world it was also easy to make very large bulk purchases. Because the mainframe has been around for so long, many advanced network management systems exist that provide a high degree of support and fault isolation.
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