uucp to hundreds of sites

[Jim Rosenberg]

I will be making a decision soon on a DP machine for a company with several
remote sites.  I've specified UNIX at both ends, with the DP software in a
4GL.  (My inclination at the moment is toward Progress, but that's another
matter.)  We are transferring files right now by chewing gum and baling wire,
and I would like to be using uucp so it will run unattended and automated from
both ends.  At the moment we have only a few remote sites, but we hope to
bring on a new franchising system that will be expanding the number of remote
sites -- perhaps explosively.  I've been told to prepare a plan that can
handle 100 remote sites relatively soon, expanding from there to *hundreds* of
sites.  I can't give exact figures on how much data needs to be transferred,
but a typical transmission is probably 30K to 90K.  The nature of the business
means that there are periods where the demand peaks drastically, i.e. certain
days of the week where we might have to talk to everybody -- perhaps even
during business hours!

I hadn't known about all this planned growth.  When I heard about it my
reaction to this kind of demand was to think multiprocessor, such as a
Sequent.  (An earlier article I posted on whether a Sun could be used for DP
suggested Sequent.)  There is currently *TREMENDOUS* uncertainty about whether
all these franchises will actually happen, and the ability to incrementally
upgrade all the way to "mainframe" power <how I hate that word "mainframe"!>
is extremely attractive.  I've got them pretty excited about this idea.

My question is, are any of you out there talking to this many sites *without*
using either a huge machine or a multiprocessor box?  How many uucp sites is
anybody handling with say a 68020 or 80386 box with slave I/O processors?
Unisys is trying to tell us a supermarket in our area is talking to 80 sites
with just a Unisys 5000/50, which is a 68020 and 1 slave 68010 I/O processor
per 8 serial lines.  I'm pretty skeptical.  I asked them for a copy of the
uucp LOGFILE -- so far no response.

I know a machine like a Sequent will do the job (yup, I know they picked a
Sequent for uunet) and with that kind of box I know exactly what the recourse
is if the machine begins bogging down.  If anybody's getting a solution any
other way I'd be interested to hear about it.  It's not that I'm looking for a
reason not to get a Sequent or Encore (any others I should be looking at??) --
I just want to cover all the bases.

-Thanks,
-- 
 Jim Rosenberg
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