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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.