Santa Clara, California-based Auspex Systems Inc last week unveiled a series of upgrades and additions to its NetServer series of network file system processors. Available on both the recently-introduced NS 7000 and NS 6000 and 5000 lines is new home-grown failover software called DataGuard, which Auspex claims will provide 99.986% uptime when used in conjunction with its other Continuous Data Service offerings. Auspex, which blames Unix and application crashes for 50% of network downtime, says that if the host processor fails, DataGuard enables input-output services to continue for the five minutes or so Unix takes to reboot. Continuous Data Service also includes redundant power facilities, hot-swappable disks, disk mirroring, fast file system check and file system fault recovery. Auspex’s patented functional multiprocessing architecture was designed to separate the server’s processing functions and leave Unix out of the data path. With it, Auspex reckons downtime can be reduced to under two hours a year. DataGuard is $15,000 on the 5000, 6000 and 7000 model 200 host processors – $25,000 on model 500s. In addition, Auspex has upgraded the host processor board in the NS 7000 from 55MHz to 90MHz HyperSparcs and has plans to move the network processor, which runs the functional multiprocessing kernel, from a dual-40MHz SuperSparc to HyperSparc next month. The 68030-based disk storage processor is untouched for now. Storage capacity has been pushed up to 540Gb using 9Gb drives and the NS 7000 now comes with up to 30 Ethernet and eight FDDI connections from 24 and four respectively. With 32Mb RAM, host processor upgrades cost from $5,000. Network processors go from $45,000 with one FDDI and four Ethernet connections. And 9Gb drives are priced from $8,000.
