At the time when we chose Exodus, all Unix Microcosm development was being undertaken on Silicon Graphics machines, and there was not a pre-compiled version of Exodus for this kind of environment. The best solution (recommended by the Exodus development group) was to install the Storage Manager server on a Sun workstation, and port the client library to the Silicon Graphics environment. So the client library was ported and installed on the Silicon Graphics machine.
The other problem was the installation of the server. The Exodus Storage Manager server uses System V shared memory and semaphores, and needs 12 Megabytes of disk space. Finding a Sun server in the department that could have its kernel reconfigured was not a very easy task. The next section will describe the data modelling used.