Datacom Makeover: Leased Lines to Frame Relay
Penny Lunt · ABA banking journal · 1996
About five years ago realized that from a technology perspective our bank was quite a bit behind the times, says Walter Hatten, vice-president and technical support manager at Hancock Bank, Miss. ($2 billion in assets). A group of people in information systems came up with a strategic plan to bring the bank up to date. The plan would take it from a traditional SNA mainframe setup to client/server, provide new platform and teller software, enable documents and checks to be scanned and stored optically, provide videoconferencing, and take advantage of other technologies that would make the bank more efficient. The backbone needed to make all of these changes possible was a faster and more capable data communications network. The bank had 9.6 kilobits-per-second point-to-point lines (over which the equivalent of about half a PC screen of text can travel each second) connecting the teller and CSR terminals, automated teller machines, and other devices throughout the bank to its IBM 3745 mainframe in a hub-and-spoke configuration. Previously when a teller at a branch needed to pull information from the mainframe on a checking or savings account, on a good day he would get a response in three to five seconds. If had one of our red-letter days in which did more activity than the lines could really handle, it wasn't unusual for them to have a 10- to 12-second response time, Hatten says. Today, the tellers consistently get a sub-second response time. Images of documents and video images can be sent across the network (one day the bank hopes to have a virtual mortgage loan officer in each branch). The file servers in the branches are backed up centrally very quickly. There have been fewer than ten line outages since the network was installed. Under the old network, we had a full-time person whose job was to deal with the phone company concerning our line problems, Hatten says. has moved on to another position within the bank. Frame relay frugality Hatten and members of his team spent a year investigating different forms of router technology that would make such an efficient and sophisticated network possible at a relatively low cost. (A router is a device that passes data between local area networks, first examining the data and selecting the cheapest, fastest, or least-busy of all available routes.) Hatten planned, designed, and manages the network himself. He says he got his expertise by doing a lot of reading. I've been doing data communications since about 1977. Back in those days, if you could get a 2400-baud asynchronous line up, you were God, he says. Through the years it's been part of my job to try and learn about these technologies and apply them to banking. In the fall of 1994, he found out that BellSouth was going to deploy switches that would support frame relay in 26 major cities in the Southeast. Gulfport wasn't one of those places, but told them we'd make a commitment, become sort of an anchor tenant to them, on the Gulf Coast if they would bring that technology to Gulfport, says Hatten. From November 1994 to April 1995, Hancock Bank installed a frame relay network and rolled out other technology including personal computers connected by local area networks in the branches. It now has about 800 IBM workstations--a mix of DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT PCs--using a Novell network operating system, run with Netview off a RISC 6000 processor. Frame relay is a high-speed packet switching technology that achieves greater performance than earlier X.25 packet switching networks. Packet switching is a data transmission technique in which information is segmented and routed in discrete data envelopes called packets, each with its own appended control information for routing, sequencing, and error checking. It allows a communications channel to be shared by many users, each using the circuit only for the time required to transmit a single packet. …