Mac Forum / Applications / Other MS Products / June 2006

In our environment we've got 5 W2003 servers that are running SFM to provide
file sharing to various versions of OS 9 an OS X Mac clients.  Four of these
servers are connected to a highly available and replicated SAN, with the
fifth server fronting a NAS for larger files and archiving.  Ours is an
organization with an approximate 50% annual storage growth and a requirement
to continue to keep older files into the future.

Given the limitations of SFM, and taking into account that we already have
tens of thousands of "Mac" files on file shares, I want to eliminate the SFM
installations completely without disrupting the way our Mac users currently
get to their files.  Clustering, a big no-no, with SFM is high on the list of
things we'd like to do with our file servers.  I know that ExtremeZ-IP will
solve the clustering issue we have, and shouldn't cause any issues with the
existing files.

As well, we'd like to look into automated archival products, like EMC's Disk
Extender...but I'm very concerned about the resource file alternate file
stream holding us back on that.  Even with a third party application, we're
still going to have this issue with the resource fork, yes?

Also, am I reading correctly when I see that ExtremeZ-IP would allow us to
remove all of our Dave and ADmitMac installations on the Mac clients?

Anyone who can shed some light on these questions would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Will