Transarc Corp, the Pittsburg, Pennsylvania-based Carnegie Mellon University spin-out formed to enhance and market the Andrew File System local and wide area high-speed distributed file system, has announced Transarc AFS 3.0 as its first product and says it will be available in March. Key feature of the system, designed for the generality of Unix computers, is that it enables uers to access files across the country as easily as those in the same room. The Andrew File System can scale to thousands of users at large sites, but also improves productivity in workgroups with a small number of workstations, Transarc claims. With Transarc AFS, access to files is achieved in the same way that users already use Unix files, regardless of the physical location of the file or the type of hardware used and individual users access the file systems from their own client machines while servers provide file services to a group of clients. Users see only a single, large file system. Transarc AFS 3.0 incorporates technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University under the campus workstation project with IBM – IBM is an investor in the company. Transarc AFS was designed to support thousands of users without loss of performance – at Carnegie Mellon, Transarc AFS supports 10,000 users, with 17 file servers and 2,000 client machines. It is being submitted to the Open Software Foundation under the latter’s distributed computing request for technology. No prices were given.
