+----- On Tue, 10 Aug 1999 12:24:31 CDT, Arvind K Aggarwal writes: | | > > One other thing that came to my mind is that Auspex does not support | > > CIFS and HTTP. I believe they do FTP. I'm not interested in CIFS | > > or HTTP myself as I use Filers with NFS exclusively, but I am glad | > > that I have the option of turning on CIFS when my organization | > > decides to use CIFS directly from storage appliances. You may say | > > that the presence of the host processor on an Auspex enables one to | > > do a variety of things like run Samba, but I assure you that Auspex | > > is not optimized to perform any major file operations via its host | > > processor. Also, if you think that you can rdist something quickly | > > to an Auspex box you're in for a disappointment. Both NAC and | > > Auspex are built with a small set of file services (NFS, etc.) in | > > mind. If you don't go through these services in case of Auspex you | > > suffer severe performance penalties. With NetApp this is not a | > > problem as there is no way circumventing those services aside from | > > their proprietary volume copy mechanism which is very robust itself. | > | > Tom, when was the last time you looked at an Auspex? | > | > CIFS is supported. (I also only use NFS :) | > | | Really! Auspex was in our office (I work with Tom) last Friday and asked | us to use SAMBA.

Auspex has implemented AT&T's ASU, they call it NeTservices. As such it is a couple of steps removed from M$ so you don't get the latest bugs. There are some restrictions to using NeTservices with regards to OS which I don't recall too well but I don't believe that any of our machines qualified due to the hardware being too old. The 4front machines do pretty well as CIFS servers. If Auspex had had the 4front ready earlier then it would probably have tipped the scales from 49/51 in Dell's favour to 51/49.

/Michael