Hypercom Fashions Seamless LAN/SNA Integration for Talbot's

Integrated Enterprise Network Links LANs While Preserving SNA Network Integrity

In the highly competitive world of the women's clothing industry, maintaining high quality products and customer service is critical for continued success. No company understands this more than Talbot's, the premier specialty women's clothing retailer in the US. When Talbot's realized it could improve its quality control process by enabling its workers around the world to share LAN-based applications, it needed a way to link its discrete LANs without having to install, manage or pay for dual SNA and LAN networks. Talbot's turned to Hypercom Network Systems to create a consolidated, deterministic, frame-relay-based network that transports both LAN and SNA traffic, and has significantly reduced overall data communications costs while improving response times.

Talbot's had in place a number of quality control checkpoints, which start with the design of the clothing, to ensure that the manufactured goods meet the company's specifications. Recently, Talbot's began installing LAN-based client-server applications to address clothing design, import tracking and other specific business needs as they arose in several of its offices. While some workstations had access to the mainframe through gateways and 3270 emulation, the LANs were essentially isolated from each other. And so when information from a design application running in the Hingham headquarters was needed by people in the New York, Lakeville and Hong Kong offices to ensure quality, the only way they could get the information they needed was by fax and overnight couriers.

As the information on the LANs became more critical to the quality of Talbot's products, this "print then distribute" system became more of a bottleneck. Soon, Dave Nagy, Talbot's director of technical services, began receiving requests for greater access to the LAN-based applications that would soon lead the company to implement a complete network makeover.

"People in Hingham wanted access to an application running in Hong Kong, and people in New York, Lakeville and Hong Kong wanted access to an application running in Hingham," recalls Nagy. "But we knew from the start that we didn't want to put in dual networks with parallel connections, one serving LANs and one serving SNA traffic. We knew we wanted a consolidated network that would handle both types of traffic without compromising reliability, integrity or performance."

With close to 400 retail outlets in the US, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom, and a mail-order operation that sends out millions of catalogs to customers each year, Talbot's relies heavily on the IBM ES9000 mainframe running MVS/ESA 5.1 in its Tampa, Florida, data center to run its global business. Equipped with the latest levels of CICS, IMS, DB2 and VTAM, the mainframe was linked to the company's facilities in New York, NY, Lakeville, MA, Knoxville, TN, London, England, Toronto, Canada, Hong Kong and the headquarters in Hingham, MA, using traditional multipoint leased lines anchored with IBM 3745s and 3720s. Preserving the integrity of this system was of the utmost concern to Nagy.

"In 1994, after looking at frame relay for several years, we felt it had matured to the point where it could provide the performance, reliability and interconnectivity we were looking for without having multiple networks," said Nagy. "We also decided we did not want to encapsulate SNA traffic in IP packets because we felt it was non-deterministic and could adversely affect response times, something we have since learned is often the case."

Having worked previously with Hypercom to provide credit authorization transaction routing from their retail stores to the host, Talbot's now looked to Hypercom's Integrated Enterprise Network (IEN) as a way to implement their consolidated frame-relay network. Hypercom's IEN, a multi-tiered network integration approach employing a unique transport technology, overcomes the fundamental incompatibility between SNA and the internetworking protocols. IEN products combine Ethernet and Token Ring intelligent hub and router functions, legacy protocol support, drop-and-insert voice, DSU/CSU, dial back-up modem and data encryption and compression in a single, compact, rack-mounted enclosure, eliminating the multiple access devices and parallel networks Fortune 1000 companies now use to independently transport SNA, LAN and voice traffic between branch offices.

"Hypercom's IEN looked attractive because it manages each type of traffic -- SNA, Ethernet, Token Ring -- with an individual processor card that can handle the traffic more efficiently," said Nagy. "The IEN solution also provides prioritization, letting SNA traffic go out over the network before any LAN traffic arriving at the same time. These two features assured us that our SNA traffic could be delivered across frame relay with response times equal to or better than what we were experiencing with our leased lines."

Concurrent SNA/LAN operation and consolidation is Hypercom's specialty. 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.

Nagy's first challenge was to find a frame relay vendor that could provide the global service Talbot's required to reach all their offices. Not wanting his company's network to be at the mercy of multi-party consortiums, Nagy chose to work with a single carrier capable of providing service worldwide, and one the company had experience with for their leased line service.

"We chose Sprint based on their pricing, their commitment to our schedule and their ability to carry traffic with the lowest error rate of any of the vendors we've worked with before," said Nagy.

Talbot's installed Hypercom's IEN at each site and configured them to support each site's LAN. Talbot's installed Hypercom IEN 3000s in its Hong Kong and New York offices for both SNA and Ethernet LAN traffic, and in its London and Toronto offices for SNA traffic only. Hypercom IEN 5000s were installed in the Hingham headquarters, the Tampa data center, the Lakeville distribution center and the Knoxville telemarketing center, handling SNA, Ethernet and Token Ring traffic. The IEN products also perform translational bridging, letting Talbot's NetBIOS-based LAN in Tampa communicate with any other LANs in the company by translating the NetBIOS into IPX as needed.

"We have proven that this connectivity does work," said Nagy.

Nagy presented some challenges to Hypercom while working with them to design the network, set the specifications for each site and install the hardware. For example, protocol converters Talbot's had installed to handle their high-speed Xerox 4050 laser printers still implemented flow control at the hardware level.

"Hypercom had been expecting all flow control to be handled with software," explained Nagy. "But it took Hypercom only a couple of days to recode their software, reload it onto the SNA processor cards and get the printers working."

This example only served to reinforce Nagy's original decision to choose Hypercom's IEN solution.

"One of the reasons we chose Hypercom in the first place was that should a situation like this arise, we would be able to reload the drivers on individual processor cards without affecting any other part of the network," said Nagy. "In fact, we've continued to do that many times as new software versions are provided to us to improve performance or address particular situations we encounter. We simply schedule time in our quiet periods to reload these drivers, and the network is back up and available in a couple of minutes."

Nagy also asked Hypercom to modify its equipment to run PU Type-4 traffic across the frame relay network from the 3745 in Talbot's Hingham headquarters to the 3745 in the Tampa data center.

"We had a number of IBM 3174s and other equipment sitting behind the 3745, and I did not want to run a separate leased line or convert the equipment to Token Ring to provide communications," said Nagy. "Hypercom was able to provide us the code on their SNA processor cards to run PU Type-4 traffic across frame relay. We went from three 56 kbps leased lines to two 128 kbps frame relay links and maintained our network response time."

In other cases, conversion to Token Ring provided Talbot's the solution they needed, and Hypercom was able to handle it all. The Tampa data center employs Token Ring for its LAN as well as on its 3745 to transport data between the IEN 5000 and the host. In the Lakeville distribution center, Talbot's removed all its 3720 and 9370 front end processors and replaced them with Token Ring attached 3174s, attached the IEN 5000 to them through a Token Ring interface and attached the IEN 5000 to the frame relay network through a 128 kbps link.

"Two 56 kbps leased lines had been providing the link between the Lakeville facility and the Tampa data center before the switch to frame," said Nagy. "Now, with the new configuration, our response times have dropped like a rock from 0.7 to 0.8 network seconds down to 0.3 to 0.4 network seconds."

All of Talbot's sites employ the IEN's dial back-up capability, which has enabled some of the company's sites to continue to communicate with the data center even when they have experienced local network problems. This summer, Talbot's hopes to have Hypercom's ISDN card installed at all its major IEN-5000-equipped sites to maintain adequate response times even when the primary network is unavailable.

"With our dial back-up strategy, we well be able to maintain communications with all our sites even in the worst-case event of a complete failure of our Tampa data center T-1 line," explained Nagy. "With the frame relay access and dial back-up provided by the IEN, we'll be able to provide quick restoration of our network in the event of a major disaster."

Nagy estimates Talbot's will save about $70,000 a year with its Hypercom-based frame relay network compared to its previous leased line costs. But it's the improved communications, response times and network reliability that will enable Talbot's to ensure its customers of the highest quality clothing.

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