Network Appliance Inc has launched the fifth model in its Filer Series of Network File System servers, claiming the NetApp F540 is its first enterprise box. The F540 is the Mountain View, California company’s first RISC-based system – it uses Digital Equipment Corp’s 275MHz Alpha 21064A processor – and is rated at 2,200 Network File System operations per second at under nine milliseconds response time and over 900 operations at under four milliseconds. It is designed for mission-critical high- performance client-server environments; software and hardware product design development, financial services, on-line and Internet services providers, and telecommunications.
Fully-protected
It supports 200Gb disk now – 300Gb later – FDDI, FDDI-TP and 100Base-T for data intensive networks, PCI expansion bus and SCSI-2 interfaces, tape back-up through DLT Digital Linear Tape and its flagship WAFL Write Anywhere File Layout file system. Performance is rated at over 2,000 Network File System input-output operations per second with fully protected data through RAID. The company says it provides high-speed sequential input-output for data-intensive applications such as computer-aided design, software development and Internet service. The F540 runs the company’s transport-independent NetApp operating system software combining high-speed file system with integrated Network File System and RAID technology. The system avoids Unix overheads by using a single file system that grows automatically as new disks are added. Prices start from $100,000. The company did $47m turnover in the year to April compared with $15m in 1995. It raised $25.7m in an initial public offering in November which it will use to cover operating costs. Europe contributed 9% of turnover last year, and Network Appliances expects this grow to 20% this year. It has sales offices in France and the UK and plans to open another in Germany. Sun Microsystems Inc has recently started out after the firm with its new dedicated Netra NFS 150 (CI No 2,921) which helps legitimize the Network Appliances strategy, says president and chief executive Dan Warmenhoeven. Meantime, the Netra NFS 150 is comparable with boxes we stopped shipping 18 months ago, he says.
