FREE online courses on Information Technology - Chapter 9 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURES - How Do You Share

 

As users work with their PCs, they develop new ideas for how they can be used. Within departments, the idea of sharing became popular: Why not share common data, expensive devices like laser printers, and so on? The local area network (LAN) makes all of this possible. The LAN enables users to share data through a special PC that is dedicated file server.

 

Consider the pharmaceuticals firm that buys data from an international service that collects information about the sales of prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical  firm is located in New Jersey and the database of market data is in Europe. To reduce access costs, once each quarter when the database is updated, a large extract is loaded onto the file server of a LAN in the marketing department at the pharmaceuticals firm. Whenever a marketing analyst wants data, he or she downloads it from the file server to a PC for further analysis. All of this is made possible by the LAN.

          Now the PC can server multiple users who want to share data. Not only that, but some companies have developed applications we might say look appropriate for a midrange system by using a LAN. Some OLTP systems on mainframes can run on midrange machines; some midrange applications can run on LAN's.