The trade press frequently talks about application servers. These are very different beasts from our appfilers and one should not confuse the two.
An application server is usually a transaction type LAN server like a database server. The application is running on the server and LAN client send it requests and get returned results.
The campus financial system and student information systems are examples of such transaction servers. At the time of writing, the financial systems are hosted on Sun based Unix computers using Oracle.
Individual groups on campus will use Unix and NT application servers as part of their operation. Waterloo Polaris does not interfere with this ability or the platform options for these servers.
Waterloo Polaris appfilers are fileservers which hold many files related to applications in trust for user workstations, so workstations need not have all the complete packages on the local disk. But it's actually more complex than that, we have a cached filesystem so application performance remains acceptable for networked applications. Please see the Waterloo Polaris homepage for details.