[ Thanks to Anthony
Awtrey for this link. ]
“We have developed a reliable, stable NT Desktop environment for
our customers. … We founded our architecture by selecting
open, standard protocols rather than specific applications. This
decoupled our client application selection process from our server
platform selection process. We could then choose the server
based on our needs for reliability, scalability, and manageability
and let customers independently choose their clients based on their
needs of platform (NT or UNIX), features, and preferences. … Our
customers are happy because the “tail” doesn’t “wag the dog”. Our
ability to manage this infrastructure is superior because the dog
doesn’t wag the tail either. The resulting system gives us a strong
base to build new services.”
“In this paper we hope to refute several myths: (1) It is
impossible to provide reliable NT Desktop services. (2) It is
impossible to integrate NT and Unix into one coherent environment.
(3) Adding NT desktops means getting rid of all UNIX back-end
servers. We prove these by demonstration.”
“For small-scale NT file service, NT Server is appropriate. A
UNIX Server is appropriate for small-scale NFS service. If the data
must be accessed by both, a UNIX server running SAMBA [SAMBA] or
Syntax TotalNET [TAS] is fine. We have multiple terabytes of data
and it almost always needs to be accessed from both kinds of
clients. … For medium-scale file service with CIFS and NFS we
choose Network Appliance Filer (referred to as the NetApp Filer)
[Hitz1] dedicated file servers. A typical user has a directory on a
NetApp Filer that is exported via NFS for access from UNIX and as a
“share” available to NT systems.”