In the realm of human communication, interpreters often help share information. In the networked computer world, similar interpreters are at work. Two common communication protocols in the networking world, NFS (Network File System), the de facto standard in the Unix world, and SMB (Server Message Block), Microsoft Corp.'s file access language of choice, have had their problems interoperating.

Until now traditional solutions to this enterprise dilemma have centered on getting one of the players to speak the language of the other--Unix requires a daemon to act as an SMB server or Windows NT requires a service to act as an NFS Client.

Enter the NFS Gateway A relatively new entrant, NFS gateways are the translators that sit between SMB clients and NFS servers and enable native client file access. In Network Computing's University of Wisconsin-Madison Real-World Labę we tested four NFS gateway products: Hummingbird Communications' Hummingbird NFS Maestro Gateway, Intergraph Corp.'s AccessNFS Gateway, WRQ Reflection's NFS Gateway and XLink Technology's Omni-NFS Gateway.

To view the Report card.Generally, the quality of these products is exceptional. Specifically, we were impressed with the high throughput of these gateways--we were able to serve more than 11 MB per second from our Windows NT server. As expected, all of these products offer NIS (Network Information Systems) integration. With their ability to load not only NIS names, but also map users directly into an NIS map and create the necessary Windows NT accounts, these gateways are solid.

Top honors in our roundup go to Hummingbird NFS Maestro Gateway, which buzzed past the competition. It features blazing performance and a solid interface wrapped up in a very well-implemented solution. WRQ's Reflection NFS Gateway also was a strong finisher. It's a well-designed server, and close attention has been paid to NIS integration and the automation of mundane tasks.

Hummingbird Communications Hummingbird NFS Maestro Gateway 6.01
Hummingbird continues to be one of the big players in bringing NFS to the desktop, and its NFS Maestro Gateway is the best in this field. It offers a solid management interface and extreme speed.

With its speed, or more accurately its throughput, Maestro leads the pack. It pushed the testing envelope, using nearly all the network bandwidth we could throw at it. During the performance testing of Maestro, our back-end NFS server, a dual-processor Sun Microsystems Ultra 60, started to work at 15 percent of the CPU power of the machine. When the results came in, Maestro had planted itself firmly in the lead. Because NFS Maestro Gateway is built on NFS Maestro Client, the speed of this gateway most likely can be attributed to the corresponding speed of NFS Maestro Client. (See "Unix To NT, NT to Unix: NFS Connectivity Options Galore for Microsoft Windows NT," at www. NetworkComputing.com/822/ 822r2.html, for a review of NFS Clients for Windows NT.)