Bigger, better, faster, more.

Those were the themes American Federal Savings Bank had in mind as it rushed to link its 43 remote branch office LANs and install new software distribution and file transfer capabilities— all employing the bank's existing Systems Network Architecture backbone.

"In a little over a month, we had to have a system in place where we could easily add new users, send files around the enterprise and do software distribution— all with a three-person IS staff and a directive not to increase telecom costs," said Fred Wilson, network systems administrator and senior MIS analyst for American Federal.

"The driving element behind the new network was to eliminate the old terminal-to-mainframe financial applications and replace them with new distributed client/server-based LAN applications," he added.

The bank turned to Automated Programming Technologies, Inc., an SNA software development firm based in Bingham Farms, Mich. The firm's APTNet software lets the bank link its branch office LANs over its existing SNA backbone without having to install branch office routers or adding other backbone protocols, such as TCP/IP.

"Most of our traffic now is IPX, and we have a small amount of SNA, but we get to retain our existing WAN products," Wilson said.

APTNet is a software package with three components: software on each client PC on the LAN, code that runs on the LAN server and a component that runs as a VTAM application on the mainframe. It works by encapsulating LAN traffic between the server and the mainframe through a proprietary APTNet protocol, letting the LAN traffic run on top of the underlying SNA net.

In American Federal's case, each of the 43 branch office LANs is outfitted with a Novell, Inc. NetWare server running APTNet.

"Without APTNet, we would have had to install a separate TCP/IP-based WAN and routers, which we found to be too costly," Wilson said.

The company looked at a number of branch office solutions, including Cisco Systems, Inc.'s routers, Novell's SNA Links software and IBM's LAN-to-LAN over WAN program, but found none to be as cost-effective as APTNet.

"APTNet costs about $1,000 per branch, and the others averaged about $2,000," Wilson said. "Plus, it is rare to find people who are PC literate, let alone anyone who knows about LANs or routers in our branches, so we needed something we could administer centrally."

Since APTNet also includes its own software distribution and file transfer capabilities, the company did not need to purchase separate packages to perform those duties, Wilson said.

In the past, if the bank needed to make changes in its systems or update files or software, it had to make 43 sets of floppy disks and ship them to all the branches, he said. Then the support staff had to spend hours on the phone going over installation procedures with the branch folks— a time consuming, expensive process.

With APTNet's integrated software distribution and file transfer capabilities, changes can be sent from the main-frame to the branches at the push of a button, according to Wilson. The bank also uses APTNet to make network con-figuration changes.