This is not correct. Auspex does support NFS, CIFS and HTTP in the same manner as Netapps - in fact, instead of emulating the protocols, they are incorporated into the Auspex O/S. I have no idea if this is better or not.
-----Original Message----- From: Arvind K Aggarwal [mailto:aggarwla@cig.mot.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 1999 10:25 AM To: tkaczma@gryf.net; drechsau@tiny.net Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: How does Netapps win and lose business? (cont.)
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.
Arvind Aggarwal
-- Mike Horwath Admin & Manager @ VISI.com WORK: drechsau@visi.com IRC: Drechsau http://www.visi.com/ HOME: drechsau@geeks.org The only Minnesota ISP with public statistics: http://noc.visi.com/ Garbage In -- Gospel Out. - berkeley fortune(6)
Cwaeth Sam Schorr:
This is not correct. Auspex does support NFS, CIFS and HTTP in the same manner as Netapps - in fact, instead of emulating the protocols, they are incorporated into the Auspex O/S. I have no idea if this is better or not.
I'm afraid I don't understand what "emulating" a protocol means. Were I an end user, I shouldn't have to care where and how a protocol stack is executed, so long as it executes fast enough that I don't have to care.
I presume that by "Auspex O/S" you mean DataXpress, the embedded OS that runs on the NP, not the Solaris kernel that runs on the HP. Note that the implementation of CIFS et al. within Data ONTAP is at about the same "depth" as its implementation in DataXpress. If your criterion for protocol validity is that it runs under Unix or NT, then not only do NetApp and Auspex fail on this account, but also Cisco, NetWare, Ascend, and so on.
"Better or not" is best judged by comparing the performance of the implementations, although it may also be valid to consider how easy it is to maintain or improve an implementation.
Mike Tuciarone Platform Software
-
Michael J. Tuciarone -
Sam Schorr