Mark Wahl

Great classic computer technology: PrestoServe (20090314)

In 1989, Legato Systems, founded by former Sun NFS engineers, is developing its backup software, NetWorker. But first, it releases a non-backup product, PrestoServe.

I suggested we run with PrestoServe to gain some experience in marketing and selling a product and to create an early awareness of the company, [said Louis Cole, former CEO of Legato Systems]. Essentially, PrestoServe gave us the chance to establish the Legato name and to put the business processes in place that we would later need for NetWorker.

The Legato PrestoServe was a hardware and software package for UNIX servers, priced at around $8000, and later resold by Sun and bundled by Digital.

The hardware consisted of a card with 1 MB nonvolatile, battery-backed up RAM.

The software leveraged this RAM for disk write caching. This was intended to provide a significant performance boost for NFS deployments, since the NFS server could respond to the client as soon as a write was commited to NVRAM, rather than waiting for the write to reach the disk.


 
PrestoServe as an SBUS card
PrestoServe as a SIMM

Besides NFS, it would also help with servers where many small, short-lived files were being created:

 

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