Guilford Mills, Inc., based in Greensboro, North Carolina, is the largest producer of warp knit fabric in the free world. The company runs local area networks at 16 sites across the US. All plant and marketing sites connect to the Greensborough corporate data center through a nation-wide WAN. The wide area network includes 1,400 nodes, an AS/400, a Burrows mainframe, and several HP 9000s that act as data servers to the whole enterprise.
"We are migrating from our Burrows and AS/400 mainframes to the HP 9000s," said Ted Fishman, director of information technology at Guilford Mills. "As part of this migration we need to provide LAN connectivity to the HP 9000 over ArcNet. Our Windows PCs run PowerBuilder to communicate with the Oracle database on the mainframe, but to make it work we need IPX to TCP/IP connectivity for every workstation."
In their search for a LAN to UNIX connectivity solution, Guilford Mills evaluated products from Novell, Wollongong, Arcadia, and Firefox.
"We selected NOV*IX from Firefox," said Fishman. "One of our main requirements was that our solution support ArcNet. Everyone supports Ethernet but NOV*IX is one of the few with built in support for ArcNet. Another big factor for us was NOV*IX's server-based IP address pool. NOV*IX performs just as well as workstation-based solutions but is far easier to maintain. In addition, NOV*IX requires 30-40K less workstation overhead than locally installed TCP/IP stacks."
As a server-based IPX to TCP/IP solution, NOV*IX eliminates the need to install, track, and manage IP addresses and TCP/IP stacks on individual workstations. With NOV*IX on the server, every user at Guilford Mills has on-demand access to the data on the HP 9000 data servers from their Windows desktop. Other advantages of NOV*IX include improved scalability, and more consistent response time.
"We installed NOV*IX in October, 1994 and have noticed significant time savings," said Fishman. "We estimate many man hours saved just by eliminating the installation and management of 1,400 TCP/IP stacks and IP addresses. Because of NOV*IX, we manage TCP/IP connectivity on only 16 servers not 1,400 workstations."
In addition to mainframe connectivity, NOV*IX also gives Guilford Mills universal Internet Access. The same server-based IP address pool that connects LAN workstations to the HP 9000s also provides LAN access to the Internet.
"Our use of the Internet is really growing," said Fishman. "We use the Internet for electronic mail and to access all the data and services available on the World Wide Web. NOV*IX's built in firewall capabilities give us added security when accessing the Internet. Users access the Internet right from Windows as well, it's very convenient."
"Administering LAN to UNIX access through NOV*IX is very simple," said Fishman.
"Installation is simple, the product is very stable, we don't need to install a TCP/IP stack on every workstation, and we don't use any workstation TSR overhead. With NOV*IX, TCP/IP connectivity is just plug-and-play. Every new machine we put on the network automatically has access."
"... While most Internet security products are UNIX- and TCP/IP - based, NOV*IX supports Novell's IPX and provides firewall security in a direct interface between the Internet and Novell NetWare networks."
Copyright Firefox Communications, Inc. 1995.