Davis, Dean (DeanD@fishgame.state.ak.us)
15 Apr 98 13:44:00 KDT
-----Original Message-----
From: "Sandy Lindstrom"
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 1998 1:12 PM
To: Davis, Dean
Subject: "What Good is SMP if You Can't Use it?".
On March 30, PCWeek published an editorial column by Michael Surkan
titled "What Good is SMP if You Can't Use it?". Ron Lee of Novell's
Advanced Dev elopment Group authored Novell's response to PCWeek's
editorial board. In his Letter to the Editor, Lee clarifies Novell's
position on SMP support an d provides the most recent NetWare web server
and Java benchmark results. Please use this information to answer any
questions or comments you receiv e from our customers or partners.
To the Editor:
It's important to network users to clarify some of the issues raised by
Michael Surkan in his column about Novell's support for symmetrical
multiproc essing ,"What Good is SMP if You Can't Use It,"( PC Week, March
30).
Novell is committed to supporting symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), but
we don't believe SMP is the proverbial hammer that solves every computing
pr oblem. NetWare provides SMP support for CPU-intensive applications
that require CPU scalability such as the Oracle8 server, but we don't
mandate the purchase of SMP platforms when customers are servicing
I/O-intensive workloads. These workloads are not CPU-bound and scale
differently. However, if a customer chooses an SMP platform, the
high-efficiency of NetWare and Novell's network services free up
significant CPU resources for existing and f uture SMP-enabled
applications.
For example, last week at Novell's BrainShare technical conference,
Intel's John Miner announced that Novell had submitted the fastest
uniprocessor r esult for SPECweb96 that has ever been submitted to SPEC.
Running on a single 300MHz Pentium II Compaq ProLiant 3000, and using
BorderManager FastCac he to accelerate Netscape's Enterprise Server for
NetWare, the Novell solution beat all other uniprocessor platforms,
including Sun's UltraSPARC and DEC's Alpha. In fact, the result even beat
most of the dual processor SPECweb96 rankings, including Sun's dual
processor 296MHz Ultra Enterprise 450. The performance represented by
1639 operations per second (Novell's result) is more than sufficient for
the vast majority of customer Intranets. On an SMP system, this
efficiency allows you add an Oracle server to the platform as well as
future SMP-enabled services and applications.
NetWare is a special-purpose OS that provides a different set of
"values." One of those values is an unbeatable price-performance curve.
For example, in the SPECweb96 result, above, the $19K Novell solution
outperforms Sun's $44K dual-processor Enterprise 450 solution. And
remember, at some point, it makes more sense to add redundant systems to
the configuration to provide service "clustering" rather than add
unnecessary CPUs to a single point of failure. This will be an
increasingly common form of scalability that provides reliability as
well.
Mr. Surkan also mentions his fear that Novell's JVM will not be able to
keep up with the rest of the industry's solutions. At BrainShare, Novell
als o announced VolanoMark 1.0 benchmark results that demonstrate
NetWare's server-side Java performance leadership. Novell's
implementation is 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's, and 5 to 10 times
faster than some Unix implementations. His fears are unfounded for
I/O-intensive server applications and he can look forward to SMP-enabled
Novell JVM later this year, for CPU-intensive server applications.
A future column might better serve your readers by helping them
understand the differences between CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive
workloads, and the value of a special-purpose network operating system
that delivers superior scalability where it makes sense. Novell is
currently supplying the faste st server-side Java development platform,
the fastest web server, and the fastest Internet object cache-all at a
price performance point that I know your readers care about.
Ron Lee
Advanced Development
Novell, Inc.
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