Baylor Health Care System Prescribes Barr Solution for Enterprise Print Management

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In Texas, they say, bigger is better. For Randy Barnett, operations analyst at Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, what matters at the end of the day is reliability, efficiency and ease of use - although bigger often comes along for the ride if you do things right.

Baylor, one of the largest not-for-profit health care centers in the nation, is a remarkable case in point. A longstanding tradition of caring and commitment to quality has served Baylor well in its position at the forefront of integrated health care. Recently, Baylor's progressive approach to technology management led to a complete overhaul of their network infrastructure. More than six-hundred miles of fiber-optic cabling and 70-miles of gigabit copper cabling now provide the foundation for integrated services at Baylor Dallas, connecting associated hospitals, clinics and offices to the data center, located at the Baylor Medical Center.

Why the investment in infrastructure? In the integrated health care arena, foresighted corporations are preparing for online medical imaging, Web-based customer services, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and many other high-bandwidth applications. These companies will need every bit-per-second they can get as patients, physicians and clinics begin to demand further integration and enhancement of services.

"The scalability of the Barr Enterprise Print Server was one of the things that really convinced us to go with Barr when it came time to upgrade,"

In this respect, the medical and allied health industry is like any other: with the Y2K threat disappearing into history books, many companies are emerging into the new century with all the advantages of the latest technology at their disposal. The question now becomes how to make the most of these investments.

For Barnett, a veteran of 16 years at Baylor, and Patricia Smith, part of the management team, one answer was very clear. The diverse mix of technologies means increased demands on Baylor's legacy systems. That's where print management and host connectivity come in - connecting up all the latest networking and business intelligence systems with Baylor's mainframe-based applications, channel-attached production printers and other systems that are difficult to replace. Barr's DOS-based products had successfully managed Baylor's print traffic for six years, and this excellent track record was a significant factor for Barnett and Smith to consider when upgrade time arrived. With its scalability, reliability and easy-to-use interface, Barr's Microsoft Windows NT-based Barr Enterprise Print Server fits the bill as the complete print management solution for the new century.

"The scalability of the Barr Enterprise Print Server was one of the things that really convinced us to go with Barr when it came time to upgrade," Barnett recalls. "Right now our print load is pretty much limited to local jobs originating from the UNIX host, which houses our financial and customer service software, and the mainframe. These jobs are all fairly straightforward. But the ability to remotely accept and distribute print data was very important for our future plans here at Baylor."

For the present, Barnett says, more than 200,000 pages per month get printed on his two Xerox production printers. That includes paychecks and tax-related documents for more than 12,000 employees, billing statements for patients, and much more. Jobs come in from the mainframe, UNIX hosts, VAX systems, and AS/400 systems.

The mainframe connects to the Print Server via an SNA gateway that is ESCON- attached to the mainframe channel for optimal throughput and response times. Using BARR/NJE for Network Job Entry (NJE) connectivity with the mainframe, the Print Server emulates an NJE host in order to provide the most powerful, flexible print routing and management options.

"NJE gives us routing capabilities that help us automate our printing processes by directing jobs to their destinations based on information contained in NJE's header fields," Barnett says. TCP/IP hosts, including the UNIX servers, connect to the Print Server via BARR/PRINT TCP/IP, a Line Printer Daemon (LPD)-based solution that accepts Line Print Request (LPR) jobs from the host.

Print traffic continues downstream to the two Xerox printers, which are channel-attached to the Print Server via BARR/PRINT390, a Bus & Tag channel connectivity solution that allows daisy-chaining of up to eight printers per adapter.

The Barr Server also works well with Baylor's reporting software, which optimizes electronic print distribution and business intelligence operations by distributing documents to desktops via the company's Web-based metropolitan area network. The Print Server accepts print data from many different sources and delivers that data to the reporting software in a suitable format. With the Barr solution at the front end of this system, getting documents where they need to be, and in the right format, are issues that never come up.

Baylor is making the most of their investment in twenty-first century network technology by upgrading to a twenty-first century print management system. With the Barr Enterprise Print Server managing all enterprise print traffic in an increasingly fast-paced and high-tech print environment, Baylor's example shows that bigger and better is definitely within an organization's reach.