Jim & Intel Investors - Intel's PROFUSION chip set & 8-Way Servers are apparently already shipping !
The City of Boston is apparently using a Hitachi 8-way Pentium II Xeon Server - with 6 Pentium IIs installed - with the Profusion chip set with excellent results !
"Its site serves 100,000 requests and 3,500 to 5,000 user sessions per day-up from 300 to 500 sessions per day in January 1998-and the city plans to put new services online this year that will strain capacity even further.
With all that traffic, the entire Hitachi server has never been down. Individual applications have gone down on two occasions, for several hours. That problem, tracked to dynamic link libraries in a third-party application that conflicted with Microsoft Internet Information Server, was corrected with a software patch. There have been no outages in the past 60 days, Tager said."
When the Profusion Chip Set is formally launched later this year, the growth of 8-way Pentium II/III Xeon systems could give a nice boost to Intel's PROFIT MARGINS.
Paul
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techweb.com
April 05, 1999, Issue: 759 Section: Clients & Servers
Boston Bets On Intel For Eight-Way Performance Mitch Wagner
The city of Boston is betting that Intel's new eight-way server architecture is heavy-duty enough to power its municipal Web site.
The city has deployed a Hitachi PC Corp. VisionBase 8880 server, the first commercial system that uses Intel's Profusion chip set for linking Xeon processors in eight-way configurations. Boston's system now runs six 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon chips with 38 GB of internal storage, but the system can scale to eight Pentium III Xeon chips and 108 GB of storage.
Boston selected the $130,000 Windows NT server rather than a smaller Intel system because the city is running its site entirely on ActiveX and SQL Server, which require substantial processing power, said Kyle Tager, senior Internet developer for the city. The site (www.cityofboston.com) lets users access information on the city government, scan for events, pay taxes and even pay parking tickets.
Running the site on a PC server also gives the city a uniform architecture from desktop to server. That makes it easier to manage content, since users on PCs in different departments can present information for uploading to the server independent of the IT department, using tools written in-house.
"In developing three-tier platforms, it makes sense to keep your tiers uniform rather than going piece by piece," Tager said. "Usually, you'll have compatibility problems." The city developed its site using Allaire Corp.'s ColdFusion but switched to Microsoft InterDev to preserve uniformity.
Although some users have complained that PC servers are less stable and reliable than RISC servers (InternetWeek, March 22), that's not a problem for Boston, Tager said. Its site serves 100,000 requests and 3,500 to 5,000 user sessions per day-up from 300 to 500 sessions per day in January 1998-and the city plans to put new services online this year that will strain capacity even further.
With all that traffic, the entire Hitachi server has never been down. Individual applications have gone down on two occasions, for several hours. That problem, tracked to dynamic link libraries in a third-party application that conflicted with Microsoft Internet Information Server, was corrected with a software patch. There have been no outages in the past 60 days, Tager said.
At A Glance
City Of Boston
Problem: Finding a server to run its information and services site, www.cityofboston.com
Platform selected: Hitachi VisionBase 8880, with a capacity of eight Pentium III Xeon chips and 108 GB of storage
Price: $130,000
Software: Windows NT, Internet Information Server, SQL Server
Copyright ® 1999 CMP Media Inc. |
