Effective SNA Gateway

The innovative tradition of SNA Server continues with release 4.0. SNA Server has always provided robust LAN-to-host gateway connectivity, and the new release gets even better, with support for up to 30,000 concurrent sessions per server. However, an effective SNA gateway also will integrate dissimilar PCs, LANs, and host systems. Microsoft SNA Server accomplishes this by supporting industry-standard SNA application programming interfaces (APIs) on most of the popular PC operating systems and across several LAN transports, as shown in Figure 1.1.

One of Microsoft’s primary design goals for SNA Server was to support the integration of all popular LAN clients with all SNA host systems. SNA Server supports IPX/SPX for NetWare environments, TCP/IP for intranet environments, Banyan VINES for Banyan environments, AppleTalk for Macintosh environments, plus NetBEUI for IBM LAN Server and Microsoft LAN Manager environments. Additionally, SNA Server allows organizations to maximize their investments in network infrastructure by providing broad support for all popular PC operating systems.

Figure 1.1 SNA Server integrates a broad range of desktops with IBM Host systems.

SNA Server supports the required SNA host types, including IBM mainframe and midrange systems, physical unit (PU) types, and logical unit (LU) types as shown in Table 1.1. IBM midrange support is comprehensive and includes the IBM AS/400, Advanced 36, System/36, and System/38 computers.

Table 1.1 Host computers, PU, and LU types supported by SNA Server