It seems the computer industry in the 90s is all about standardization and improving
existing technologies rather than revolutionary change, and it's an appropriate time for that.
Still, it's exciting to see technology that is genuinely new and promises a
glimpse of the future.
Mango's beta release of Medley97 is one of those products that is so cool,
you'll want it whether or not you need it. In its current incarnation, it's
aimed at smaller companies and workgroups, but I have no doubt that it will mature
in a few years and offer compelling enterprise benefits.
Medley97 is a storage-oriented, distributed NOS. It rides on top of Windows
95 and pools the resources of network-attached machines to create a single,
virtual server. A Windows NT version is expected in a few months.
This virtual server appears as a local hard drive on each of the
participating machines, rather than in Windows 95's Network Neighborhood. I'm
a little skeptical about that, but implementing it in Network Neighborhood would open
up a whole new can of worms, taking away from the whole concept of Medley97.
Stable technology
I installed Medley97 on six Windows 95 machines and found it to be
remarkably stable for a beta product, especially for such a new technology. At
each station, the installation program asked me how much of the local hard drive I wanted to
set aside for the Medley97 pool, and it created a file of that size that would hold the data
from the network. In that way, it's a lot like conventional swap files -- but the files
are used by the entire network, not just the local machine.
One of the really nifty things about Medley97 is its intelligent use of
resources. Because files are distributed across the network, some files you
access may be on your local machines though others need to come from another node on the network.
This distinction is transparent during use; you never need to know where a file actually is.
Intelligent management
Medley97 manages the resources so there are always at least two copies of
any given file; you can shut off a machine on the Medley97 network without
losing access to files that are stored on it. Likewise, if a machine dies, its portion
of the Medley97 network isn't harmed because there is a duplicate of its data on another
machine on the network, which is copied to a third machine as soon as the first goes down.
Further, Medley is smart enough to keep those copies on the machines that
are using them. For example, if you're working on a Word document and you store
that document on the Medley97 drive, it will most likely end up on your own system,
(it will also be copied somewhere else for fault tolerance).
Security on a Medley97 drive is fairly simple but effective; users are
automatically in charge of their own directories and can grant rights to other
users. There's also a main administrative password to modify user rights.
Maximizing your resources
Medley97 weighs a machine's suitability for storing files based on its CPU
usage and free disk space; idle machines with a lot of disk space are used
before in-use machines with less disk space. When testing on a six-node
network, I couldn't find any performance difference after installing Medley97.
Medley97 also uses the free RAM on idle participating machines as a giant
networkwide disk cache. This idea of harnessing the idle processing power and
disk space on many machines is so good that I'm surprised nobody's done this before. As
time goes on and Mango's product (and inevitable competitors) matures into an enterprise solution,
the impact could be enormous.
Serious enterprise operations probably won't be able to use Medley97 for a
while, but its future is so compelling that I'd recommend getting acquainted
with it.
Brooks Talley (brooks_talley@infoworld.com) is the
test manager at the InfoWorld Test Center.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Medley97, beta
This product is a revolutionary distributed network OS that's worth a look
even though it won't be ready for the enterprise for a few years.
Pros: Capitalizes on idle resources; easy installation; innovative idea.
Cons: Needs more cross-platform support; lacks administrative tools.
Mango Corp.; www.mangosoft.com [updated].
Price: Two-seat software starter kit: $249. Additional seats: $199 each.
Platforms: Windows 95, Windows NT Workstation, and Windows NT Server.
Ship date: Late this year.
Copyright (c) InfoWorld Publishing Company 1997
