Year-old Santa Clara, California start-up Network Appliance Corp is attempting to create a new class of file server with the introduction of its first product, FAServer, a file server appliance designed for Network File System networks. The company claims the single-function file server is faster, easier to use and administer, more reliable and less costly than today’s Unix-based file servers. According to Network Appliance, FAServer is the first implementation of a new direction for network file servers called file server appliances. By focusing on a single service, an appliance can be made easier to use and can be optimised for performance. With reduced complexity, reliability is increased. By removing general-purpose capabilities and associated hardware and software, cost is reduced. Apple Computer Inc’s laser printer and Cisco Systems Inc’s dedicated router are other examples of the notion, according to Network Appliance president Michael Malcolm, founder of Canada’s Waterloo Microsystems Inc, now part of Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. Research by Dataquest and Technologic Partners indicates 70% of the networked Unix servers (and 80% of NetWare servers) are used as dedicated file servers, stripped of applications by their administrators to improve performance. The evidence suggest a ready-made market for stripped-down appliances. The company, now eight strong and seeded by an impressive array of private investors from the industry, is initially targeting the $2,000m Unix Network File System niche since it is financially bigger though numerically smaller than Novell Inc’ market. Novell and Apple could follow. Network Appliance has got its machines as far as beta test on less than $1m, its initial $1.4m coming from the likes of Autodesk Inc chief executive Carol Bartz, ex-Digital Equipment Corp engineering vice-president Gordon Bell, former Sun Microsystems Inc president Owen Brown, former Microsoft Corp president Mike Hallman, former NetFrame chief executive David Hanna, Tandem Computers Inc co-founder Jim Katzman and MIPS Technologies Inc co-founder Skip Stritter among others.
Venture funding
It expects to get venture funding of $2m to $4m over the summer when it will start shipping. Primarily it thinks of itself as a software concern. Its FASware software includes a proprietary 80,000-line real-time kernel and an all-important Write Anywhere File Layout file system designed from the ground up to handle files up to 4Gb and requiring no disk partitioning, a traditional Unix nightmare. Unlike traditional servers, said Malcolm, FAServer optimises writing performance, enabling every write to the disk to go into a free block regardless of location. It is constrained only by Ethernet. Space is increased by adding disk drives. Network Appliance has also created its own RAID manager to optimise performance. An on-line Snapshot back-up facility automatically keeps up to 20 logical copies of the entire system on the RAID disk array and can be used to make tape back-ups. Also included are a SCSI disk driver, Network File System and TCP/IP protocols and an Ethernet driver. Network Appliance says the system takes only 30 minutes to install, 30 seconds to reboot and its documentation is only 30 pages. It is said to be easy to upgrade and service because it’s based on standard uniprocessor 50MHz 80486 EISA bus hardware. The hardware includes a maximum of seven internal 1Gb 3.5 disk drives. Compared with Auspex Systems Inc, from where its technical people came, it says preliminary LADDIS benchmarks indicates a response time of 7mS versus 21mS and a throughput with two Ethernets of 415 input-outputs per second versus 466, at a price of $37,000 versus $200,000. Compared to a Sparcstation 10 it did 130Mb Network File System writes at 158 seconds versus 971 seconds and reads at 130 seconds versus 144 seconds. The product is expected to sell for from $17,000 to $30,000 when available in June. Network Appliance expects to push it through value-added resellers, systems integrators and distributors in the US and through OEM custome
rs and distributors in the Far East and in Europe.
