A company from Palo Alto, California claims to have come up with a networking system that impoves the performance of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Network File System on Sun’s own servers by at least 50%. Legato Systems Inc has introduced Prestoserve, a hardware-software product that acts as a file system accelerator, cutting network server overheads and speeding up critical Network File System functions. It comes with a software tape, VMEbus board and documentation. Priced at $8,000, it will be available from September. Prestoserve was designed by Legato’s founders, a team of software engineers largely responsible for developing Network File System. In particular input-output functions and a server’s NFS disk write speed have been accelerated under Prestoserve. The first implementation is for Sun-3 and -4 Network File System servers, though others are said to be under consideration, and is the first in a series of networking products the company is said to be developing. Legato was founded in September last year, with venture funding from Mayfield Fund and Greylock.
