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Q. Distributed - client server systems or stand-alone machines?
A. Distributed and networked systems offer some real advantages.
These days we have a very varied choice of machines and configurations to choose from. Is it best to have every user standing alone as an island on their own or can we gain some benefits from networking machines together? Well that’s a ‘no-brainer’ of a question. Of course its better to have things networked. But what is the best way?
On the one hand, you really need each workstation to be lightly loaded as a penalty for being part of the net. You don’t for instance want to serve disk space to any great extent from a machine that is being used interactively. Even having a PC running in a workgroup can cause frustrating hangs while it checks a busy server for incoming mail.
Solutions that are Macintosh based can operate in a small group with just the AppleShare software that is built into the MacOS. Likewise Windows machines can operate as Windows for Workgroups nodes. If you need to go a little more industrial strength, you can plug in a Windows NT server and serve printers and larger disks to a group of PC’s. Likewise, the Apple Workgroup Server will serve a group of Mac’s and you can add e-mail facilities to both of these.
It starts to get a little more complex when you need to be cross platform compatible. So if you have a mix of PC and Macintosh systems, you can, with the addition of the appropriate software serve both kinds of clients.
For a larger group or bigger asset base, the optimum solution will probably be to install a large UNIX based server. This might be a Sparc 630 for example but need not be as ambitious as that. A Sparc 10 or even a Sparc 2 might do well enough. On this you can host many Gigabytes of disk and serve the Macintosh and PC systems with their own native file server protocols. Alternatively, you can install on both the Macintosh and PC systems the necessary NFS client software and mount disk volumes that the UNIX machine will export.
All of these solutions provide shared facilities at the file system level and there is a lot of scope now to move onwards and upwards to a shared and distributed database model. The only thing that is certain about that approach is that it will cost you money.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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