Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire-based Ambar Systems Ltd, distributor for a number of communications companies, has brought the peer-to-peer local area network full circle with the launch of a diskless workstation for NetWare Lite. The company has also announced several additions to its existing range, including new disk arrays for NetWare and a SCSI hard disk system claimed to be the fastest available. The diskless workstation, sourced from Netcom Research Inc, incorporates a solid state Flash secondary store. This is divided into 360Kb of programmable memory and 64Kb of BIOS and upgradable boot BIOS – it is the last that enables it to be used with NetWare Lite or other local area network systems which lack the remote boot PROMs capability. Once the necessary operating system information has been downloaded to the Flash Disk, the product can be attached at any point on the network using the hard disk-based workstation as a server. It seems like a neat idea, but Ambar may have problems convincing customers of the advantages: an 80386 workstation operating at 20MHz will cost UKP900, not much below the price of a fully-fledged hard disk system. What remains to be seen is whether the security advantages – files cannot be removed or viruses introduced – are enough to convince potential users. Ambar is claiming a first with its new SCSI hard disk subsystem, which it says is the industry’s only complete line of Fast SCSI-2 systems with full support for NetWare and OS/2. The product is sourced from Lanham, Maryland-based Storage Dimensions Inc, and gives burst data transfer rates of up to 10Mbps while it is available in 525Mb, 1.05Gb, 1.35Gb and 2.1Gb versions. It consists of a packaged Fast SCSI-2 drive and one of Storage Dimensions’ Fast SCSI-2 busmaster host adaptors for EISA, Micro Channel or AT servers, as well as the necessary drivers for either NetWare or OS/2. Prices have to be firmed up, but they will start around UKP27,000. Also from Storage Dimensions, the new NetWare disk arrays, for use with version 3.11, support Redundant Array of Independent Disk, RAID, levels 5 and 3, as well as data striping. Fault-tolerant, they come in 2.1Gb and 4.2Gb capacities, 2.6Gb with data striping. Each system combines a Fast SCSI-2 interface and Fast SCSI-2 host adaptor, enabling burst transfer rates of up to 10Mbps in EISA, Micro Channel and AT servers, while an intelligent busmaster is said to improve server efficiency and exploit Fast SCSI-2. It sells for between UKP3,716 and UKP37,900.
