Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcso!rjn
From: rjn@hpfcso.HP.COM (Bob Niland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: 20GBYTE Optical on Diskless 340 ?
Message-ID: <7370109@hpfcso.HP.COM>
Date: 21 Mar 90 21:00:03 GMT
References: <1990Mar13.234341.5720@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lines: 30

re: >>Can't be done, yet.  Diskless clients can't have locally mounted file
    >>systems.  They can have swap disk, raw device access, but no block-I/O.

>	Is it really that hard to do? 

There are all sorts of thorny technical problems, not the least of which is
defining the capability set....  do we allow both swap & fs on the disk?
Can it/they be shared between cnodes/server?  What happens if a cnode
crashes, etc.  Nonetheless, local mount is planned for 8.0 (but this is not
a firm commitment by HP that it will be there).

>	Would that be a marketing issue or technical issue?

Marketing has wanted it since 6.0.  It has always been a technical issue.

>> Suffering the pains of watching the world migrate from HP-IB to SCSI...

>	Well, if ther are 2GB HP-IB disk drive with faster read/write times
>	and cheaper in price than SCSI, I don't see why hp customers would
>	ever want to migrate from HP-IB to SCSI.

Our SCSI disks are already 2x the file-system throughput of HP-IB, and with
the advent of SCSI-2, HP-IB performance will be left in the dust before too
long.  Future HP-IB disks promise to be more expensive too, since the mechs
now always have controllers that are industry standard (SCSI, ESDI), and
thus an external bridge-board (usually ESDI-to-HP-IB) is required.

Regards,                                              Hewlett-Packard
Bob Niland      rjn%hpfcrjn@hplabs.HP.COM             3404 East Harmony Road
                UUCP: [hplabs|hpfcse]!hpfcla!rjn      Ft Collins CO 80525-9599