|
British Printing Company is a group of some thirty different companies, handling all sectors of the printing industry from magazines, catalogues and books to packaging and labels. In fact a visit to the local supermarket will undoubtedly bring you face to face with at least one example of their work: British Printing Company is responsible for printing all Heinz labels.
The Information Technology division of the group, responsible for providing IT services to all the different nationwide companies, is based in Watford. The heart of the group’s computing resources is an ICL mainframe which runs, amongst other systems, an on-line ledger system which is accessed constantly by the regional sites. Each of the thirty sites has a UNIX system, either DRS 6000s or Teamservers, running a variety of applications such as costings, project management and paper handling. Communications between the sites is handled by the group’s private X.25 network.
Malcolm Cotsworth, Technical Support Manager for British Printing Company was keen to adopt a proactive approach to caring for his users: "We are the central action desk for any problems from anywhere in the group. With sites as far afield as Glasgow and Exeter and no dedicated support personnel at many of the site, we wanted a system that would alert us to an impending problem, before we got a call from the user shouting for instantaneous help.
"We trialed three products and finally chose Athene based on cost and ease of use."
Having attended a Metron seminar and see Athene in action, Mr Cotsworth was "very impressed both with the demonstration and how pertinent it appeared to be to our requirements. Whilst we had originally just been looking for an alert system, I realized that we would be able to carry out a number of other important monitoring and forecasting activities using exactly the same data with Metron’s Athene product."
A consultant from Metron collected data from one of British Printing Company’s sites using Athene and produced a report from Mr Cotsworth on the findings. Again, he was impressed with the results, and the decision was taken to install Athene at the IT centre in Watford.
For Metron, British Printing Company’s installation is slightly unusual due to the group’s reliance on ICL’s File Transfer Facility (FTF). The normal communications protocol, TCP/IP, used by Athene could not be used on every machine and thus an alternative solution was required.
Together, Metron and British Printing Company worked out an alternative scenario, using FTF to collect data from the remote UNIX machines onto a RS 6000 at Watford. Data is then transferred using TCP/IP from this system onto the LAN, on which the PC-based Athene/Unix control Center resides.
A successful pilot has been run with all sites to be monitored.
Malcolm Cotsworth added: "Our principal reason for purchasing Athene was as an alert system for identifying potential problems. However, the software will also prove its worth as we plan upgrades to our hardware We need to replace a number of the DRS 6000s with Teamservers, but want to do this where the capacity is approaching a critical level. The Planner application within Athene will allow us to assess which systems need to be replaced by a Teamserver and by which particular model, so that we can gain the optimum performance at the least cost."
Next Case Study
|
