Many enterprises have tried employing "free" software like Samba and even some vendors like SGI have tried to incorporate it into a "product"; hopefully some of these folks on this list will respond to your request but from working with "some" of these enterprises I can tell you from experience that Samba neither "scales" in the enterprise nor does it perform beyond about 75 clients doing useful work in a medium to large domain structure..it also is not an easy beast to administer( as explained to me be by several admins); it is "free" , however...
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"
-----Original Message----- From: Philip Thomas [mailto:thomas@act.sps.mot.com] Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 11:03 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Samba Vs CIFFS
Hi, Why should some one pay good money to buy CIFFS license from NetApp when apparently the similar functionality is available "free", Samba? I am hoping folks out there, with experience in both products would be willing to share their knowledge as much their internal policy allows. I am specifically looking for pros and cons with respect to (a) performance (what ever than means) (b) scalibility (500+ users) (c) reliability (d) functionality (e) coexistence with Windows Terminal Server (f) 'cost' (not just dollars) (g) administration (h) interaction or lack of it with commercial apps ...any thing else ?? Perhaps this list is biased to CIFFS, by definition of the mailing list. But I have seen folks willing to speak out in the past. [BTW, please don't shoot the messenger:-)] Thanks.
Philip Thomas Motorola - DDL-ITG, M/S M360 2200 W. Broadway Rd Mesa, AZ 85202 rxjs80@email.sps.mot.com (480) 655-3678 (480) 655-3881 (fax)
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 ---
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John.Davis＠netapp.com -
Todd C. Merrill