A year after shipping its first product, Transarc Corp, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania says it has installed its AFS 3 distributed file systems in over 100 sites worldwide including the US and nine other countries. The software, a version of which will appear in the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, has attracted many former Network File System users, according to Transarc president Alfred Spector. Spector described the sites as 60% commercial, 30% educational and 10% government. Transarc is working with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on deploying a national wide-area file system. The purpose of the exercise, connecting 40 AFS sites US-wide, is to document how collaboration is enhanced, within a single site and among geographically dispersed sites, when a user perceives no difference between accessing a local file or one remotely stored.
