Venture capital-backed start-up Auspex Systems Inc chose the InterOP show to reveal its first product – the first of a new line of Unix servers specifically designed to boost data throughput on a network, while reducing the cost per seat (CI No 1,276). The Auspex NS 5000 will process up to 1,000 8Kb Network File System operations per second, and connect up to eight Ethernet local area networks for an input-output capacity of 80Mbytes-per-second – 10 times the network input-output performance of conventional server architectures, according to the Santa Clara, California-based company. The secret lies in a new architecture – dubbed Functional Multiprocessing architecture – which takes the network, file and storage processing functions normally performed by the CPU and distributes them around the system. Four Motorola 68020 processors with local memory and supported by bit-slice processors and custom ASIC devices are used for this task: a host processor which supports Sun’s SunOS Unix implementation, and an Ethernet, File and Storage processor each dedicated to its task. A Sparc-based system is being considered for future release. Auspex claims to be the first company to separate the Unix file system from the operating system, and has optimised its performance with a large, directly addressable primary data cache memory. As a consequence, the machine can support over 100 diskless clients per server, rather than the 10 to 20 clients on typical systems, supports multiple Ethernet segments, has greater disk capacity with faster disk access (16Gb in the base system cabinet), and simplified network and data management. Price for a base configuration is $114,900, including 2.6Gb memory and two Ethernet ports. Auspex is going after the Unix/Network File System-compatible market rather than the personal computer market targeted by Carlton Amdahl’s NetFrame Systems Inc (CI No 1,273) – a market set by Dataquest at $1,600m in 1990, growing to $4,300m in 1994. Auspex executives include chairman Jim Patterson from Quantum Corp, Larry Boucher from Adaptec Inc, Dick Bush from Bridge Communications, and Jerry Clancey from Tandem. The company, which has received $7.8m of funding so far, could pose a considerable threat to Sun’s own fast growing network server business, a particularly profitable sector of the workstation market.
