Excerpts from mail: 10-Feb-94 Re: PC Interconnection usin.. Bill
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (2843)
> What does NOT scale, is the intermediate server technology, like the
NFS-to-AFS translator.
In our campus environment of roughly 15,000 PCs and Macs, its become
apparent to us that effective, organized file management (software
distribution, user data backup, file sharing, etc) is nearly impossible
to accomplish using commercial Network Operating System (NOS) products,
or by relying on traditional IP-based solutions. Our few hundred UNIX
workstations, on the other hand, are a dream to manage because of the
volume management features inherent in AFS's distributed file space
design.
If today's commercial NOS servers, with all of their friendly "point &
click" user features, could be made to service data from AFS rather than
>From local file systems, then these "intermediate" servers might make
our entire campus of computers a dream to use and manage -- without
requiring major changes to network infrastructure, server inventory or
desktop architecture.
NOS products from Novell, Microsoft and others can already use the UNIX
and NFS file system from which to share files, but a clean jump to
access AFS on NOS servers, while preserving a reasonable degree of data
security and user friendliness, has not been accomplished.
It seems that the leap from local to distributed file sharing on
intermediate NOS servers would be fertile ground for commercial
ventures, but the idea seems miserably slow in catching on. We wonder
now, who will lead the race toward distributed personal computing:
commercial NOS providers or desktop OSs. In the mean time, we operate
with an unmanageable system.
-Bob
