2/19/00 - Compaq Server Scales With Windows 2000 -- ProLiant 8000 Is Brawny Enough To
Handle The Back End Of An N-Tiered Deployment
Feb. 18, 2000 (InformationWeek - CMP via COMTEX) -- Forget client-server. If distributed scalable
applications are what your business needs, the answer is an n-tiered architecture. On the front end, this
means having presentation-tier servers that provide an interface to your applications. In the middle, there
are applications servers that manage the presentation-tier servers, perform business logic, and interact
with the back-end database servers. On the back end, heavy-duty database servers focus their power on
transaction processing. One such server is Compaq's new ProLiant 8000.
The n-tier model is tremendously flexible, able to scale and adapt to changing business conditions.
Because the presentation servers communicate only with clients and application servers, and application
servers generally interact and synchronize with the data store and not one another, adding more servers
in those tiers doesn't add to a network's complexity. Horizontal scalability, or adding peer servers in
those tiers, is a viable option for presentation and application servers.
Horizontal scalability doesn't work as well for increasing the database and other transaction-processing
servers. Load-balancing solutions for databases exist, but in such an environment, each database server
needs to ensure that its data is in sync with all its peers.
What's the solution? Vertical scalability, or increasing the capability and throughput of the individual
servers. Depending on the performance characteristics of the application, this can happen by improving
storage throughput, bus speed, memory capacity, or the number and performance of the individual
processors. This increases performance, but doesn't increase complexity.
The ultimate vertically scaled machines, of course, are transaction-processing behemoths such as the IBM
S/390 G6 or Sun Microsystems' Enterprise 10000-symmetric multiprocessing machines with a dozen or
more processors. The world of Intel x86 servers and Microsoft's Windows NT operating system-which
rely on clusters, not massive computers, for scalability-has been left behind.
But the Wintel handicap is starting to change, thanks to several factors. One is Intel's Pentium III Xeon
processor line and the associated Profusion chipsets, which allow for eight-way symmetric
multiprocessing PC servers with minimal hardware overhead required to keep the processors in sync.
Another factor is the release of Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server, which is able to take
advantage of eight processors.
I evaluated the release-to-manufacturing version of Windows 2000 Advanced Server on a system
designed to take advantage of that technology: the Compaq ProLiant 8000, with eight 550-MHz Pentium
III Xeon processors, each with 2 Mbytes of Level 2 cache, 4 Gbytes of RAM, and 21 9-Gbyte drives
configured via RAID 5.
It's an impressive server-but for a system priced at $102,301, it had better be. And there's still room to
grow, with support for 16 Gbytes of RAM and 18.2-Gbyte drives.
In testing, I couldn't generate enough traffic to bog down the ProLiant 8000, even running applications
such as IBM DB2 Universal Server 6.1 and Microsoft SQL Server 7. My front-end database-access scripts,
running on two IBM Netfinity 5500 servers and an Acer Altos 1100E server-all dual-processor
machines-were outflanked by the ProLiant's native horsepower.
The major issue with a big machine such as the ProLiant is reliability, but Compaq has built considerable
redundancy into the ProLiant 8000 hardware and management software.
Even so, there's no way to recommend using any single server, even one like the ProLiant 8000, as the
sole server for a vital n-tiered deployment. But what about, for example, a small cluster of ProLiant
8000s, initially populated with only two processors, with plenty of room to grow? The reduced complexity
makes this a very attractive proposition-and it's much simpler to expand by doubling the number of
processors than by doubling the number of servers.
---
At A Glance
ProLiant 8000 Model 4S
Compaq
Houston
800-282-6672
www.compaq.com/products/servers/proliant8000
PRICE
$102,301 as tested (eight processors, 4 Gbytes of RAM, 21 hard drives); $58,180 for base configuration
STRENGTHS
- With Windows 2000 Advanced Server, can scale well-designed Win32 applications
- Management and reliability features are designed for extreme reliability
WEAKNESSES
- Server consolidation concentrates vulnerability
- High price requires considerable commitment
to Windows platform
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