Maximum Strategy Incorporated

This paper will attempt to examine the industry requirements for shared network data storage and sustained high speed (10’s to 100’s to thousands of megabytes per second) network data serving via the NFS and FTP protocol suite. It will discuss the current structural and architectural impediments to achieving these sorts of data rates cost effectively today on many general purpose servers and will describe an architecture and resulting product family that addresses these problems. The sustained performance levels that were achieved in the lab will be shown as well as a discussion of early customer experiences utilizing both the HIPPI-IP and ATM OC3-IP network interfaces. Back in the dark ages, about the time that touch-tone telephones were coming into vogue, computers were simple things that read in some data and a program, processed the data and spit out the answer. Data storage typically consisted of small amounts of cor