Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:31798 comp.sys.mac.programmer:6223 comp.protocols.appletalk:1951 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!rex!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!ccnysci!alexis From: alexis@ccnysci.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.protocols.appletalk Subject: Finally, Peer-to-Peer non-dedicated AppleShare, this month!!! Summary: It looks like we can finally junk TOPS. What a relief! Message-ID: <1968@ccnysci.UUCP> Date: 12 May 89 05:52:52 GMT Reply-To: alexis@ccnysci.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) Organization: City College of New York Lines: 122 Finally, a Peer-to-Peer non-dedicated distributed AppleShare! For a long time now, people have been wishing for an AppleShare server which didn't require a dedicated Mac. For just as long, people have been buying TOPS instead. But now we are beginning to see just how bad TOPS really is. It's totally incompatible with AppleShare, and Sun has no interest in or desire to implement AFP compatability in the near future, despite markting claims to the contrary. There are also a host of bugs that make using DBMSs with TOPS difficult to impossible. Finally, a solution is at hand. IPT will shortly be releasing Peer-to-Peer AppleShare, which does NOT require a dedicated machine for file service. You can read all about it on page 1 of next week's MacWeek, but here is a summary: 1) Peer-to-Peer AppleShare runs on Macs, PCs, and Unix machines. 2) Price for the Mac software is *** $150 *** per server! 3) Claimed speed is "slightly faster than AppleShare." 4) Fully compliant with AFP. 5) Does NOT send out garbage serial-number packets on the net. 6) To be released by June 1. Now, all this comes from talking to their marketing VP. She is a very capable person technically, so the chances of her being wrong because of a lack of understanding the subject are pretty much nil. As to whether or not they are overestimating their speed or compatability, I will know soon, as we are receiving beta copies early next week. Note that the price for setting up a network initially looks like it's about 1/2 the price of a TOPS network. After all, TOPS is $289 per Mac while this is $150 per Mac. (I am using list prices here for convenience, but this should scale down to street prices pretty evenly.) In fact, IPT's server is MUCH cheaper even than that. For example, one of my clients has a network of about 100 Macs and a few dozen PCs. Forgetting the PCs for now, it would cost $28,900 to network them on TOPS, and probably only ten percent of the machines (or less) would actually be file servers. So they could actually buy AppleShare on eight dedicated Mac SEs to serve the net, at the same price. In fact, they did just that, before I started working with them. On the other hand, consider the cost of setting up this same net with Peer-to-Peer Appleshare. If you want ten machines as servers, your total cost is *$1500* since you only need to buy copies of the software for the servers. All the other machines on the net use the AppleShare client server software that comes with all Macintoshes. For smaller networks, when less money is available, the difference is even more impressive. For a ten Mac network, with one server, TOPS would cost $2890, and AppleShare would cost $2600 (or more, depending on what kind of Mac you use for a server). IPT's AppleShare would cost $150. Also note that Tops consumes almost 70K more memory than the AppleShare Client software. That means that every user who doesn't need to serve up his disk gets back 70K. That's enough room for QuickMail, QuickKeys, or a bunch of smaller INITs, for example. On a 1MB Mac, it could instead mean the difference between being able to run MultiFinder or not. Administrators of large networks will be glad to know that IPT's server does not send out serial-number packets every few seconds, unlike TOPS. These packets can really clog a large network. They are especially antisocial when you are putting Macs on an EtherNet cable along with lots of other machines, a practice which is becoming more and more common at universities and large companies. When I get the Beta copies next week, there are a number of interesting questions that I will then be able to answer. For starters, how much memory does a server use? How much does this slow down the CPU? How does is respond under heavy load? Is it *really* compliant with AFP, including byte-range locking and the Desktop Manager calls? Will this software really performs according to IPT's claims? I'll let you all know, but for now it seems likely that they've done it right. IPT has been in the business since the Mac first came out, so they've got the experience to do it. Assuming it works, this will have an incredible impact on the Mac market. It will demolish TOPS virtually overnight, which might well be what Sun really wants anyway (after all, Sun's game plan calls for NFS to rule the world, not TOPS, and they've done nothing to integrate the two in almost two years). It will also consolidate the Mac networking market around AFP, and put even greater pressure on 3Com to finish up it's AFP services sooner. It is interesting to watch history repeat itself. In early 1986 InfoSphere, publisher of MacServe, virtually owned the networking market. 3Com was only a bit player. There was nothing else, except this upstart called TOPS. The great thing about TOPS was that it allowed people to use the same folders on the same disks at the same time, whereas MacServe only let one person have write access to a given disk (or volume, actually) at the same time. InfoSphere refused to upgrade their product and as a result their market share went from upwards of 90% to about 0% today. (Amazingly, from the ashes of MacServe rose Liason, a truly wonderful product which bridges multiple AppleTalk nets.) Today, the same thing is about to happen. TOPS dominates the market. They are starting to lose market share to AppleShare because they are incompatible with AFP (and thus certain important programs, such as FoxBase). But they still hold their position on the basis of TOPS's ability to run in the background and serve folders from every Mac on the net. Now IPT is introducing a product that does all this, and is also fully compatible with AFP and AppleShare, at a fraction of the price. For every thing there is a season, and TOPS' season is just about over. It's about time. I have absolutely no affiliation with either IPT or TOPS, except as an unsatisfied customer of TOPS' and as a Beta site for both companies. Copyright 1989 by Alexis M. Rosen. Please do not reprint this (distribution on the internet is OK) because it will serve as the basis of the review I am writing. --- Alexis Rosen alexis@ccnysci.{uucp,bitnet} alexis@rascal.ics.utexas.edu (last resort) You can also try alexis@sci.ccny.cuny.edu, but it may not work yet.