Hypercom Keeps Blood Systems Running

Network Consolidation and Frame Relay Service Ease Addition of Distributed System

When creating new applications using their existing mainframe-based tools became cumbersome and slow, Blood Systems, Inc., a major provider of life-sustaining blood components, decided to do what many large corporations are doing today: Create a distributed client-server platform for their new applications. But because of the life-critical nature of their business, Blood Systems' primary concern was maintaining service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even during a process that may take several years to accomplish. By combining the unique network consolidation capabilities of Hypercom's Integrated Enterprise Network (IEN) and the reliability of the Wiltel frame relay network, Blood Systems was able to create a distributed system, improve overall reliability, and lower telecommunications costs by employing a single network that supports both environments simultaneously.

Operating the second largest non-profit blood bank in the nation after the American Red Cross, Blood Systems last year processed and distributed 1.15 million tranfusable units of blood and components to 600 hospitals in 18 states, from Alabama to California. Started in October, 1943 as the Salt River Valley Blood Bank, Blood Systems today has grown to nearly 1700 employees and an annual budget of $100 million.

Operating on a Hitachi mainframe at its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, with branch offices in 48 cities linked by a typical polled, multidrop analog network using leased lines, Blood Systems primary application is to verify the safety of the blood components it sells -- their purity, potency and efficacy. But the mainframe lacked the flexible tools necessary to quickly develop and deploy new applications. They found it was becoming increasingly difficult to roll out new applications and modify and maintain their existing applications. The decision was made to develop a more effective, distributed client-server system.

Blood systems' primary goal was to develop the LAN-based system without disrupting the current environment, which maintains a 99.8-percent up time. Therefore, the network had to support the concurrent use of SNA and LAN protocols without any degradation in performance, and preferably with a performance gain. They also wanted to reduce their leased line costs moving to frame relay and consolidating their data. And they wanted to accomplish all of the above with as quickly as possible using as few vendors as possible.

Blood Systems is accomplishing its goals and requirements through a combination of multiprotocol transport and frame relay. They chose Wiltel to provide the backbone frame relay network and Hypercom to provide the infrastructure to handle simultaneous SNA and LAN traffic.

Concurrent SNA/LAN operation and consolidation is Hypercom's specialty. Of all the multiprotocol routers tested, only Hypercom's IEN products were able to demonstrate the ability to provide reliable SNA sessions across the frame relay network. This also enabled Blood Systems to avoid costly parallel networks for the SNA and LAN facilities.

Unlike other vendors' products, Hypercom's mixed-protocol technology consolidates SNA and LAN protocols in native mode without the use of tunneling or encapsulation by offering a protocol-independent, connectionless transport mechanism. SNA behaves as if it has established a direct link between front-end and terminal controllers while TCP/IP and other internetworking protocols each establish and maintain their own sessions independently. Each protocol sees a dedicated network, and is not subordinated to any other protocol.

Blood Systems was able to achieve greater system reliability by utilizing the inherent redundancy of the Wiltel frame relay network. In addition to providing instantaneous redirection of data around any central office or link failures, Wiltel's frame relay network will automatically redirect all the private virtual circuits terminating at the host site to a hot site location in the event of a host site failure. Through a contract with Comdisco?? for disaster recovery, Comdisco's mainframe mirrors all activity on Blood Systems' mainframe, as well as replicating all network management functions. In the event of a host site failure, The Comdisco system is automatically switched in.

Each Hypercom IEN product has been configured for maximum reliability, too, incorporating redundant power supplies and LAN and WAN links, as well as dial backup over the public service network in case of "last mile" line failure. The high degree of integration offered by Hypercom's IEN products increases reliability significantly by integrating router, DSU, FRAD and dial backup in a single controller, eliminating all the interconnecting cables required to link single-function boxes. And the single-vendor solution offered by Hypercom eliminates the network management and interoperability issues usually associated with multi-vendor environments.

Today, Blood Systems has already moved their financial applications to the distributed system, comprising a Sun-based server running the Sybase database with Intel-based clients running Microsoft Windows. Because of Hypercom's advanced network consolidation technology, Blood Systems is able achieve highly reliable, simultaneous transport of SNA and LAN data while reducing telecommunications costs through network consolidation and the use of frame relay. The Wiltel frame relay network provides the level of redundancy required for the backbone network and a flexible method of disaster recovery.

In the future, Hypercom's IEN will enable Blood Systems to also consolidate its PBX network onto the same Witel backbone, and could also integrate video conferencing and high-speed Group 4 facsimile. The IEN also provides the flexibility to handle any LAN configuration changes the company can foresee, including TIC attached Token Ring with SDLC to LLC-2 conversion.

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