Question: What role does Open Transport play for servers?
Answer: The Open Transport architecture is designed to provide server applications - file, print, database, e-mail, directory, and other - with a foundation for higher performance and for more flexible configuration, while maintaining the historical differentiation of Mac OS servers - ease of configuration and administration.
Question: How will Open Transport enhance server flexibility?
Answer: Open Transport introduces the capability of activating more than one network connection at the same time, using the same networking protocol. This capability is known as multihoming, and enables servers to support more clients, to offer greater total performance, and to increase the reliability of mission critical applications.
Open Transport also enables the development of transport independent applications. This will be especially valuable for server applications which need to be deployed in AppleTalk, or TCP/IP, or NCP/IPX, or other protocol environments.
Question: How will Open Transport enhance server performance?
Answer: Servers, as network-aware applications, gain access to the higher performance PowerPC native implementation of networking protocols that Open Transport provides. To exploit this performance opportunity, server applications must be accelerated for PowerPC and must utilize the new Open Transport XTI APIs.
Severs will also benefit through access to new high-speed PCI datalink implementations such as fast Ethernet and ATM.
Question: Will Apple's server products such as AppleShare exploit Open Transport features?
Answer: Yes. AppleShare 4.2.1 is the first version of AppleShare to be both PowerPC native and Open Transport ready. It takes advantage of other Open Transport features as well, including support for multihoming.
Question: Are PCI Mac OS systems with Open Transport recommended as application servers?
Answer: Apple recommends that server application developers adopt Open Transport v1.1 as the basis for new network applications development as soon as is possible within their product life cycles. As these updated versions of server software become available customers will find that the combination of PCI, Power Macintosh, and Open Transport makes a great platform for flexible, high-performance network applications.
It should also be noted that Apple generally recommends the Apple Workgroup Server product family, rather than re-purposed desktop hardware, for use as server platforms.
Article Change History:
08 Mar 1996 - Changed distribution status.