In January 1989, HFC Bank Plc made news when it embarked on project to replace its central IBM 4381 mainframe with a network of no fewer than 190 IBM AS/400 systems (CI No 1,085). Now it is replacing the 150-odd branch-office AS/400s with PS/2 Server 295s, running OS/2. At the time that IBM launched the servers it said that they offered performance and resilience comparable to some minicomputers, so the computer manufacturer can hardly complain. Computer Weekly first winkled out the UK change, but on the larger scale, the move sees HFC come into step with its North American parent, Household Finance International Inc of Chicago, says HFC’s director of information technology, Ken Harvey. Outside of the branch network, the UK arm has twin date centres, one at its headquarters near Winkfield, Windsor, the other, a lights-out back-up site in Birmingham: each houses a big AS/400 D80, a D70 and sundry smaller ones. These will be staying, says Harvey – it is the periphery that will change, with B10s making way for the high-spec PS/2 servers that IBM badges from Parallan Computer Inc. It looks like a bona fide case of down-sizing for financial reasons, but with a list price of $29,000 to $34,000, the PS/2s cost about the same as an F10 AS/400, with broadly comparable performance. In fact Harvey who ran the computing operation for four years in the US before moving to the UK last year – says it is the business function that prompted the change. The original change from mainframe to AS/400 was justified mainly on the basis of cost: Harvey’s predecessor reckoned it would save him UKP400,000 a year.
If a better bid comes in, we’d consider it
This time it is the desire for a client-server environment that is pushing the company onto smaller machines. Currently The B10s that sit in the branch offices mainly act as intelligent switches or co-ordinators, linking desktop PS/2s to the data centre machines; the desktop boxes themselves spend a lot of their time impersonating 5250 terminals. That switching operation will now be managed by the PS/2s, but in addition they will run substantial server-end applications in their own right. HFC’s programming language of choice is C++ and the supplier of its branch software is York, Pennsylvania-based banking specialist Ampersand Corp. Ampersand does not supply finished applications, says Harvey – instead it supplies HFC with packages that contain C++ templates and frameworks containing the common parts needed to build banking applications. It is not truly object-orientated, Harvey says, but the system is on the way, and exhibits some of the benefits. Ampersand supplies the bank with three pieces of software – Branchteller, Branchbanker and Branchlender. The former contains the elements needed to build a financial control system, while Branchbanker provides data gathering and name and address handling and Branchlender handles the underwriting requirements. Harvey believes that together the packages account for around 70% of the finished application, with the rest built from hand-stitched C++ code. The claims that Harvey makes for this approach are impressive. Today the company is running the system under OS/2, but you can come in and see it running under Windows/NT in the lab if you want he says. Unlike his more ambitious, and famous, counterparts at the National Westminster Bank, Harvey says bluntly that NT is not up to the commercial environment yet. Similarly, he says that the code will readily transfer to any version of Unix that does not deviate too far from System V.4. His options, in short, are open. As they are when it comes to hardware. The system is flexible, he says, supporting anywhere between two and 60 users. In the US, the smallest offices use PS/2 Model 70s, in the UK however branch sizes are bigger, and consequently it is going to be PS/2 Server 295s all round. Harvey says that IBM won the bid against four competitors, purely on price and quality of service. If a better bid comes in, we would consider it, he says. In the meantime, IBM may have lost part of an AS/400 acco
unt, but it now has around 150 PS/2 servers, launched with the promise that they would support mission-critical applications, doing just that – even if it does have to hand a significant part of the money on to Parallan.
