Intranet Servers

The performance numbers shown in Robert L. Hummel's "Multiprocessor Intranet Servers" (May) were very informative in regard to how Unix and NT perform side by side in a static environment. The article also raised some good points about performance, price, and reliability. But it failed to address the most important issues: availability and performance based on future scalability.

For the moment, most major Unix vendors have the advantage in that they can handle many more processors (Sun's UltraEnterprise 10000, for instance, scales to 64 processors) and mo re than two symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or massively parallel processing (MPP) nodes.

NT's current inability to scale based on load management impedes an NT server's ability to maintain availability as concurrent user loads increase. Of course, Microsoft and server vendors are making amazing headway into the area of scalability, but organizations looking at massive growth should be aware of this.

Andrew Gup
Spectra Logic Corp.
AndrewG@spectralogic.com

Setting up a complete server system is too complex an issue to address comprehensively in eight magazine pages. Also, it's difficult to pronounce a specific performance or configuration item as the "most important" one. A significant part of the market has responded to this classic Unix protest by saying, "We don't care. NT boxes are less expensive, easier to configure, and easier to expand, and they don't lock us into a single-vendor hardware solution or become obsolete when the vendor wants a new revenue stream. Unix administrators are also harder to find."--Robert L. Hummel