Network Appliance Corp, Mountain View, California, will launch new versions of its dedicated iAPX-86-based Network File System file server this week. The existing FAServer 400 is superseded by the 450 tower, plus high-end FAServer 1300 and 1400 high-end companions for large installations. The 1300 is a 7 by 19 by 23 rack-mounted system with space for up to 14 attached external drives that will be housed in the reseller’s chosen chassis. The 1400, with the same footprint, is a high-availability version in which disks, power supplies and cooling fans can be hot-swapped and the file system expanded on line. The FASware 450, the company’s first European offering, measures 10 by 29 by 22 and again has 14 disk bays for up to 27.3Gb storage. Up to eight of the firm’s servers can be strung together with FAScluster software, providing up to 218Gb disk. Although it upgraded the software for its file server only a few weeks ago, Network Appliance has re-worked it for the new lines. FASware release 2 supports hot-swapping (on the 1400), two FDDI channels, domain name service clients, local tape control, user and group quotas, system log daemon, routed clients and serial consoles. Set to follow are new administration functions like SNMP Management Information Base, cluster management, hierarchical storage management, higher density disks, data compression, NetWare File Access and AppleTalk protocol support PCI Bus plus Pentium and RISC processor implementations. There is already an on-line Snapshot back-up facility which automatically keeps up to 20 logical copies of the entire system on the RAID and can be used to make tape back-ups. Network Appliance’s Write Anywhere File Layout file system is designed for use with arrays of big SCSI-2 drives using RAID 4 – and manages all disks as a single partition: the file system grows by adding disks. The company claims 3,189 Network File System operations per second performance and a fastest average response time of 3.1mS. It has won some 140 installations at 60 sites since the 400 shipped last June. The company has 12 US resellers and seven others around the world, from where 90% of its revenue is derived. The 1400 with two 2Gb disk is from $23,000 in May with FASware 2.0. The 450, with two 1Gb disks is $17,000, now.
