Business Challenge

POSCO's Business and technical drivers can be summarized as follows:
POSCO's IT infrastructure consists of 600 computers (in different geographical locations in S. Korea) of different hardware, different Operating Systems. Some of these PCs communicate over BSC protocols while others over the TCP/IP protocol, resulting in setting up of two parallel networks with little scope of communication between these PCs. The existing point-to-point interfaces between various applications at the different steel Works make monitoring, maintenance and new application development extremely difficult and time consuming. The current IT infrastructure is a much-closed system that is resistant to any changes in hardware or software configuration. This results in extremely high maintenance and upgrade costs. Currently, POSCO manually monitors all the Process Computer's at its various steel Mills. This needs a team of 15 engineers at each of its site. Average time between problem occurrence and its detection is quite high (approximately 4 hours).

Data exchange between a Process Computer (P/C) and a Business Computer (B/C) is not over a reliable link. Moreover, the only Backup and Recovery System (BRS) is a complex process of analyzing logs at each of the PC's and comparing with that of a B/C to manually detect differences. All logs are stored at network endpoints and at times these could be more than 200 miles from the place of detection of problem. The current system provides almost no support for remote access of logs and events for remote debugging. POSCO currently has no disaster recovery system implemented across the all steel Works. In case the Business Computer at KwangYang goes down, there is no process in place to ensure that the Business Computer at Pohang takes control of all the PC's. This switch has to be made manually at each of the 200 P/Cs that are distributed at different geographical locations across South Korea.