Barr Helps Global Book Retailer Expand Their Printing Operation Situation:

A retailing giant in the U.S. and European bookstore industry needed a fast and reliable connectivity solution to provide a more flexible link from their corporate mainframe to their Xerox enterprise printers. Their printing needs were such that the printers had to be moved off their existing Bus & Tag connection to another location some 900 feet away from the host. The company considered possible ways to increase the channel length, including channel extenders, but considering the high expense involved, they quickly began to research alternative solutions.

Solution:

Barr stepped in and provided an extremely simple, cost-effective, yet powerful solution. The Barr Enterprise Print Server took the place of the Xerox printers on the Bus & Tag channel and continued to receive the print data from the host. As far as the mainframe was concerned, it was still sending the print to the Xerox printers, so there was no need for the company’s Operations Supervisor to make any changes on the host side. Once the jobs were inside the spooler of the Barr Enterprise Print Server, the data could be sent virtually anywhere.

Since the company wanted to continue using the Xerox printers with the new common controller in a remote location, Barr consultants paired the print server with the optional BARR/PRINT to EPS module. This allowed them to pass the data back to the large Xerox production printers via TCP/IP. This would enable the book retailer to free up a tremendous amount of space inside its mainframe computing suite, as well as put the large production printers on the network where they could be used by other applications if need be. In addition, if the company ever wanted to upgrade their Xerox printers or expand their printing operation in the future, the Barr print server would allow them to easily redirect some or all of the Xerox print streams to the newer printers with minor configuration changes. This ease of upgrading is one of the more compelling reasons why this global retailer, and others like it, choose Barr as their connectivity solution. That, and the fact that they save loads of money by chossing Barr over standard channel extenders.

Response:

"In addition to allowing us to relocate the Xerox printers, the Barr Enterprise Print Server gave us much greater control over the data than we ever had. We're also able to troubleshoot a lot easier, allowing us to get around some of the problems we experienced when the printers were directly connected to the mainframe. With all this added control, and no loss in printing speed, the Barr solution has proven to be exactly what we needed. And the cost was right on target!" -Operations Supervisor for International Book Retailer