Scalability Haze

NT scalability is a critical topic for Windows NT Magazine, and testing scalability is a regular focus for our Lab. Thus, you would think the Lab Guys were thrilled by Microsoft's Scalability Day last May, right? Excitement was high when the Lab Guys flew into Manhattan, but expectations were modest--after all, Scalability Day had all the earmarks of a well-oiled Microsoft press event. As things turned out, that's exactly what Scalability Day was--a series of slick, well-rehearsed speeches and demonstrations on NT scalability. To be honest, I left New York with more questions than answers. This month, I'd like to brush the dust off Scalability Day to reflect on what attendees saw and, equally important, what attendees didn't see.

The Event
Let's start with the basics. Scalability Day was a two-part event. In part one, Microsoft herded an audience of about 500 press members and industry analysts into an auditorium and exposed us to a series of speakers--Microsoft's Bill Gates (chairman and CEO), Paul Maritz (group vice president, platforms and applications), Deborah Willingham (vice president, enterprise customer unit), and SAP's Gunter Tolkmit (vice president, corporate marketing). Each Microsoft speaker called in additional Microsoft staff to conduct the live demonstrations. The demonstrations were glitzy, MTV-speed presentations designed for the attention-challenged (I'll get to the details of the presentations later).

The second part of Scalability Day was a Microsoft Partner Pavilion where you could press the flesh with some of the Solution Partners that Microsoft deemed worthy. This group was eclectic--vendors ranged from high-end scalability hardware manufacturers to financial application software developers. I cannot begin to guess how Microsoft came up with the invitation list, nor can I guess why some vendors weren't invited. Notably absent? IBM comes to mind. (For Mark Smith's view about noticeable absentees, see his July editorial, "Scalability Politics.") The pavilion tour was a decidedly low-key event; much to my disappointment, no scalability demonstrations took place on the show floor. For example, seeing Tandem's 16 * 4 cluster demonstration would have been pretty cool, but instead, attendees were supposed to be content looking at a picture of the 16 * 4 configuration. Sometimes a picture is not worth a thousand words.

Substance or Substance Abuse?
After sifting through the morning speeches and wandering through the pavilion in the afternoon, I realized that the meat of Scalability Day was the series of live demonstrations that peppered the speeches. The six demonstrations were

• A SQL Server system containing 1TB of data: This single server was a quad-processor (Alpha 450MHz) Digital Alpha 4100 system with an attached Digital StorageWorks storage array containing 1.3TB of disk space. The server was running NT Server 4.0, the Sphinx release of SQL Server, Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0, and Transaction Server 1.0.
• A set of SQL Server systems servicing 1 billion transactions per day: This transaction load was spread over 20 quad-processor (Pentium Pro 200MHz) Compaq ProLiant 2500 systems interconnected via Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator. All the systems were running NT Server 4.0 and SQL Server 6.5.
• An IIS system handling 100 million hits per day: The platform was a dual-processor (Pentium Pro 200MHz) HP NetServer LX system running NT Server 4.0 and IIS 3.0.
• An Exchange Server system servicing 1.8 million email (Post Office Protocol 3--POP3) messages per day: This demonstration had a beta version of Exchange running NT Server 4.0 on a quad-processor (Alpha 466MHz) Digital Alpha 4100 system.
• A planned and an unplanned failover of SQL Server and an SAP application using Wolfpack clustering software. The platform for this demonstration was a two-server cluster from Tandem Computers running the Enterprise Edition of NT Server, which includes support for Wolfpack clustering.
• A realtime comparison of 64-bit NT Server vs. 32-bit NT Server: Microsoft used two identically configured systems for this demonstration. Both systems were eight-processor (Alpha 440MHz) Digital AlphaServer 8400 models running beta versions of NT Server 5.0 and the Sphinx release of SQL Server. One system had 64-bit memory access enabled, and the other system had it disabled.

Were all these demonstrations impressive? You bet! They were flashy, with lots of moving images and buzzing counters. Were they substantive? Well, that's an entirely different matter. Let's look at these demonstrations a little closer.

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