Dedicated NFS Servers

This section presents an overview of the Netra NFS Server system.

Netra NFS Server System

The Netra NFS Server system provides an easily managed, highly reliable, highly tuned dedicated NFS server. It is built exclusively to support NFS applications; Solaris software environment applications are not supported. This Netra NFS server provides superior NFS operations performance over general purpose servers.

The key benefits of this Netra NFS server include:

• Easy installation (preconfigured system)

• Easy HTML management interface with the LCD system status and input panel

• Factory preconfigured RAID-5 disks

• Dedicated, simplified operation set

• Tuned for NFS performance

• System reliability (UPS for graceful shutdown on power failure)

• Uninterruptable power supply

This server meets the demands of high speed network environments. Because this server delivers high performance for NFS operations, it is most often installed in departments and workgroups where data access requirements are high and other servers are available for running applications and system management software (see Figure 2-1).

Figure 2-1 Environments Supported by the Netra NFS Server

As Figure 2-1 shows, the Netra NFS Server system supports both workgroup and department needs.

Netra NFSServer Software Support

The easy to use customized Netra NFS SmartServe(TM) software, which is focused exclusively on NFS applications, is tuned for NFS performance and is easy to administer. The software has the following features:

• Modified Solaris operating environment (dedicated and optimized for NFS)

• SNMP agent

• Single file system and RAID 5 preconfigured

• Backup software for online backups

• Support for NFS Version 2 and NFS Version 3

• Disk management support (RAID level 5 for storage management)

• Failure management and recovery

• System performance tuning (stable memory and NFS Smart Cache)

• PCNFSD (to use with NFS on PCs)

Netra NFS Server Hardware Overview

This server is based on the Ultra 1 processor board, which is designed to deliver balanced system performance. With twelve slots of data disks, the data disk capacity of this server is 24 Gbytes (48 Gbytes with 4 Gbyte disk drives). The disk drives are hot plugable. A 10BaseT Ethernet controller is built onboard.

One of the three SBus slots are used for ISP controllers. The second SBus slot contains a 100BaseT network card. The third SBus slot is available for additional network interfaces.

This system comes in two options: tower and rack-ready. Four rack-ready systems can be installed in standard Sun racks. The system also has a standard 3.5-inch diskette drive and a 644 Mbyte capacity CD-ROM drive. The eight SIMM slots can store up to 512 Mbytes of RAM.