It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SAN describes the protocol and is, in itself, not actually a program. The implementation of SAN takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual telecommunications access method (VITA) which is the mainframe package for SAN communications.
SAN is still used extensively in banks and other financial transaction networks, as well as in many government agencies. While IBM is still providing support for SAN, one of the primary pieces of hardware, the 3745/3746 communications controller has been withdrawn from marketing by the IBM Corporation. However, there are an estimated 20,000 of these controllers installed and IBM continues to provide hardware maintenance service and micro code features to support users.
A robust market of smaller companies continues to provide the 3745/3746, features, parts and service. WHAM is also supported by MM, as is the IBM Network Control Program (NC) required by the 3745/3746 controllers. Objectives of SAN IBM in the mid-sass saw itself mainly as a hardware vendor and hence all its innovations in that period aimed to increase hardware sales. Snag’s objective was to reduce the costs of operating large numbers of terminals and thus induce customers to develop or expand interactive terminal based-systems as opposed to batch systems.
An expansion of interactive terminal based-systems would increase sales of terminals and more importantly of mainframe computers and peripherals – partly because of the simple increase in the volume of work done by the systems and partly cause interactive processing requires more computing power per transaction than batch processing. Hence SAN aimed to reduce the main non-computer costs and other difficulties in operating large networks using earlier communications protocols.
The difficulties included: A communications line could not be shared by terminals whose users wished to use different types of application, for example one which ran under the control of CICS and another which ran under TTS. [dubious – discuss] Often a communications line could not be shared by terminals of different types, as they seed different “dialects” of the existing communications protocols. Up to the early sass, computer components were so expensive and bulky that it was not feasible to include all-purpose communications interface cards in terminals.
Every type of terminal had a hard-wired communications card which supported only the operation of one type of terminal without compatibility with other types of terminals on the same line. The protocols which the primitive communications cards could handle were not efficient. Each communications line used more time transmitting data than modern lines do. Telecommunications lines at the time were to much lower quality.
For example, it was almost impossible to run a dial-up line at more than 300 bits per second[dubious – discuss] because of the overwhelming error rate, as comparing with 56,000 bits per second today on dial-up lines; and in the early sass few leased lines were run at more than 2400 bits per second (these low speeds are a consequence of Chanson’s Law in a relatively low-technology environment). Telecommunications companies had little incentive to improve line quality or reduce costs, because at the time they were mostly monopolies and sometimes state-owned.
