Access to Legacy Applications and Data

The SNA Environment

To transmit data peer-to-peer over SNA, a session must be established between two Logical Units (LUs) in accordance with the LU 6.2 protocol, with one LU on the host system and the other on the client system. Because LU 6.2 is peer-to-peer, either the mainframe host or the client can initiate a session.

Note   Older SNA networks are hierarchical and do not support peer-to-peer communications. In addition, they do not use LU 6.2; instead, other LU types are used that conform to a hierarchical networking scheme.

As shown in the figure below, any computer connected to an SNA network that uses this protocol, including computers running Windows 2000 Server or Microsoft® Windows NT® Server 4.0, can participate in the SNA environment and gain access to:

• Legacy host environments, including transaction processing monitors.
• VSAM files.
• AS/400 files (both flat and unstructured).
• Database data structures, such as IBM DB2 data tables.

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