On 06/12/99 11:04:25 you wrote:
BTW, did NetApp ever consider putting AFS on the Filers?
Excellent question! I keep asking NetApp every couple of years since about '94 for DFS and the answer, of course diplomatic, is a firm 'no' followed by "there is not enough market for DFS, NT will be our next target".
DFS is a pretty small market. AFS isn't much better, assuming you mean Andrew. If you're talking Apple, now there's a potential market. A high-performance Apple file server would be welcome to a lot of folks. However, I don't know what Apple's plans are for the future; are they moving away from their filesystem format?
Personally I'd like to see the filer have native FTP support. Just stick wuftpd in there and optimize the file transfer. Lots of ftp sites on the Internet would love it. (FTP direct to the filer rather than through a server to a filer should be measurably faster just like doing HTTP direct is.)
Bruce
DFS is a pretty small market. AFS isn't much better, assuming you mean Andrew. If you're talking Apple, now there's a potential market.
Apple toooooo. In fact we have over 400 of those puppies in our dept alone and when we bough the very first FAServer450 (No, not the F540, the 450 with 2 G disks!) in early '94 that was the very first request I had with their then V.P. On the other hand I have mixed feeling when requesting new features and additional protocol support. One of the key strength of an appliance, in my school, is it's simplicity of usage and administration. When the first FAServer's rolled out it had fewer than 50 commands with a 300 page admin book and hell of a fewer lines of code compared to other traditional UNIX systems. As we request all these neat features I wonder how much are we shooting ourselves on the foot. Once I heard that just adding ATM support on the NIC increased the number of lines of code by an order of magnitude!
-- Begin original message --
From: sirbruce@ix.netcom.com Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 15:06:51 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: AFS/DFS??!! :-) (and FTP!) To: toasters@mathworks.com
On 06/12/99 11:04:25 you wrote:
BTW, did NetApp ever consider putting AFS on the Filers?
Excellent question! I keep asking NetApp every couple of years since about '94 for DFS and the answer, of course diplomatic, is a firm 'no' followed by "there is not enough market for DFS, NT will be our next target".
DFS is a pretty small market. AFS isn't much better, assuming you mean Andrew. If you're talking Apple, now there's a potential market. A high-performance Apple file server would be welcome to a lot of folks. However, I don't know what Apple's plans are for the future; are they moving away from their filesystem format?
Personally I'd like to see the filer have native FTP support. Just stick wuftpd in there and optimize the file transfer. Lots of ftp sites on the Internet would love it. (FTP direct to the filer rather than through a server to a filer should be measurably faster just like doing HTTP direct is.)
Bruce
-- End original message --
---philip thomas
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Philip Thomas -
sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com