News Release For Immediate Release Contact: Elaine M. Wolfe, (412) 338--4448 Philip L. Lehman, (412) 338--4406 Transarc Announces AFS 3 for Sun Workstations Running Solaris 2.0 ------------------------------------------------------------------ PITTSBURGH, June 1, 1992---Transarc Corporation has announced that its AFS 3 distributed file system product will be ported to Sun Microsystems workstations running Solaris 2.0. The product will ship later this year, based on first availability of Solaris 2.0 from SunSoft. "We anticipate that Solaris 2.0 will be adopted by many of our AFS customers," said Philip L. Lehman, director of file systems marketing for Transarc. "When that happens, AFS 3 will be ready to support these systems." Currently, a majority of the over 200 AFS sites worldwide use Sun workstations. Other platforms supported by AFS include IBM RS/6000s and RTs; HP9000s, series 300, 400 and 700; DECstations; and NeXT computers. Since its commercial introduction over two years ago, AFS has become the file system of choice for many organizations. AFS makes file sharing easier for both users and system administrators, offering a single, shared name space and location-independent file sharing. AFS provides for tight security with Kerberos authentication and access control lists. Because of AFS architectural features and management tools, along with client caching and other data-transport techniques, AFS is an ideal choice for large local- or wide-area configurations. Recently, the editors of Network Computing presented their Well-Connected Award to AFS 3, acknowledging AFS as "a significant advance in network computing." Support for AFS has extended to major industry consortia. The Open Software Foundation (OSF) selected the next-generation version of AFS as the distributed file system for its Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). As a result of this selection, the Distributed File Service (DFS) is part of DCE, a package of software provided to end-users through many channels, including hardware vendors. Transarc will continue to support AFS 3, the current version, until DCE is widely deployed. "AFS 3 today delivers two important benefits," said Lehman. "It provides a high-performance, secure file system to assist immediately in managing and accessing resources. In addition, AFS prepares a site for future DCE implementation." Since AFS 3 and DCE DFS are very similar in architecture and functionality, customers with AFS 3 experience will have an easier transition to the DCE. "AFS 3 expertise is directly applicable to the DCE," adds Lehman. Transarc has outlined a migration plan for moving customers from AFS to DCE DFS. In a companion announcement, Transarc today also announced that it will deliver a production-quality implementation of the DCE, and a reference port of its Encina product, for the Solaris 2.0 environment. Transarc has been shipping early availability versions of DCE and Encina for SunSoft Solaris 1.0 and IBM AIX 3.2 since March, 1992. Transarc's announcements are linked with SunSoft's announcement of a major extension to Solaris 2.0's distributed computing architecture, called Solaris Federated Services. Transarc Corporation is a developer of open, distributed systems software, with over 100 employees in its Pittsburgh-based office. The company's products focus on two main areas of distributed computing --- file systems and transaction processing. Transarc's Encina family of products for open, on-line transaction processing (OLTP) provides a DCE-based OLTP solution for widespread, multi-vendor computing enterprises. Encina has been licensed and endorsed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Stratus and NEC. Transarc continues to invest in the development of innovative software products for distributed computing. # # # AFS and Transarc are registered trademarks and Encina is a trademark of Transarc Corporation. Other brands and product names appearing herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of third parties.
