Thank You, Todd..I much prefer customer testimonials to Netapp folk chiming in but I've seen lots of Enterprises disappointed that TAS and Samba don't scale out into the Enterprise..thanks again for the kind words.

-----Original Message----- From: Todd C. Merrill [mailto:tmerrill@mathworks.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 9:41 AM To: Davis, John Cc: thomas@act.sps.mot.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Samba Vs CIFFS

On Sat, 27 May 2000 John.Davis@netapp.com wrote:

Netapp glues the MS smb(cifs) code into our microkernel at the protocol level; Samba and other bolt-ons sit above kernel space as any other user app would and is subject to the context switching and shufflings that go on in a general purpose server; this (primarily) is why the Netapp CIFS solution both scales well and performs well as we add hundreds of users(see our Netbench results, for example); this is why the solution is not "free"

Way back when, about 2-3 years ago, I came into an environment that had Syntax TAS servers doing our CIFS services. It's not free like SaMBa, and SaMBa was a bit faster than TAS, but comparable. Regardless, I had a dozen or so Sun Ultra2 boxes running as many different CIFS servers, which could each support one development build, one NFS development build, and one CIFS development build. It was a pain to keep each of these suckers up to date and running. The Sun server could barely keep up with one NFS and one CIFS client. One upgrade choice was an 8 - 16 processor Sun box, to keep up with running all those TAS or SaMBa servers and NFS. I converted the whole thing over to a single 400 MHz 21164A processor F740 filer. Lock, stock and barrel. And, today, I'm still sane. We needed consolidation and horsepower. WAFL and snapshots and the other features mentioned were just icing on the cake.

The microkernel-level CIFS implementation is just so much *faster* than SaMBa, TAS, or anyone else's user-level implementation. A lot of companies will tell you they have NFS and CIFS multi-protocol file sharing. But, if you ask them if they do it "natively," there are only three players we found: NetApp, EMC, and Auspex.

My biggest problems today are adding more disk to support even more development sandboxes, and worrying about now managing a bank of filers. "An 800, an 800, my kingdom for an 800-series filer!"

Until next time...

The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---