Re: Project Cascade vs Oracle 8i vs Samba?

eggert_at_twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:

>On Wednesday, Sun announced Project Cascade, a product that will
>support NT file, print, authentication, and directory services.
>Cascade is based on AT&T's Advanced Server, which I've heard Auspex
>also uses.
 

>The same day, Oracle leaked info about Oracle 8i, which will include an
>Internet File System (iFS) that runs atop an Oracle engine. (Formal
>announcement Monday.)
 

>These announcements didn't address one obvious question: what will be
>these proprietary products' advantages over Samba running atop, say, Linux?
>(Clearly Samba+Linux has a price advantage....)

Well "project Cascade" right now is actually vaporware, as the announcements state "early access copies will be available within 60 days" - so I'd imagine a source code tape from AS/U just landed on some poor Sun engineer's desk :-).

When they've finished it will have all the advantages (and disadvantages) of AS/U however - it will be for all intents and purposes a full PDC or BDC implementation. The downside is - tied to Microsoft code, no future NT5.x access (see the news reports on the AT&T AS/U lawsuit), client license fees, no source code etc. etc.

Also, as all the filesystem meta-info with AS/U is kept in a spare database there will be integrartion issues (no integration with UNIX permissions) and (just as a guess) it will be *dog* slow :-).

Of course, as I'm somewhat biased, all this must be taken with a big dose of IMHO..... :-).

Cheers,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.