A problem of scale
- Article 15 of 77
- Information Age, August 2001
Conventional wisdom says that Microsoft software does not scale well enough to be truly considered “enterprise class”. But as Windows 2000 gains popularity, is it time to re-assess Microsoft's high-end claims?
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The performance benchmarks, however, are clear: at the medium- to high-end, Windows 2000 has a clear lead over its rivals, putting paid to the scalability accusations. In the standard Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmarks (TPC-C) – which measure transaction-processing performance – databases running on Datacenter Server occupy top and third place, while Advanced Server takes second place. (Third to tenth place are all taken by various Unix incarnations.) Furthermore, in the TPC-W tests, which measure web serving performance, the top five places for servers processing up to 10,000 items per second were taken by Windows 2000.
However, at the ultra high-end, Unix still has an edge. In the TPC-W tests for 100,000 items, Windows 2000 comes in third. In the decision-support arena, the TPC-H tests for databases of 100GB show Windows 2000 in second place behind Linux; worse still, it comes in a lowly eighth for databases of 300GB. And in the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation SPECweb99 benchmarking test conducted in December 2000, a Linux-based web server proved to be three times faster than Windows 2000.
Benchmarks can be deceiving, though. Michael Long, a senior developer at IT consultancy Hampton-Tilley Associates who has written several studies on transaction processing, says that the near-linear scaling of Windows 2000 as extra servers are added to configurations is suspicious. ”If I saw a trend like this in one of my benchmarks, it would raise serious questions about my environment. Near-linear almost never translates into better per-server numbers.“ He says that a closer examination of the benchmarks shows that Microsoft Transaction Server, a high-end feature of Advanced Server and Datacenter Server for distributed transactions, had been switched off.
And, naturally, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison accuses Microsoft of skewing the tests. ”We have no concerns about Microsoft. They still can't scale. They have this benchmark that works only in the laboratory. It has a three-hour mean time of failure and they chopped up the database into 10 separate little databases. If any one of those fails, it brings down the whole system. You are going to get a major system outage or wrong results every three days. It is a preposterous benchmark,“ Ellison asserts.
Those who choose Windows 2000 can indeed have problems. Online brokerage Goinvest.com, which removed its Linux servers and replaced them with Windows 2000 in exchange for ”six figures“ worth of free software and services from Microsoft, is building a Java-based online trading system for customers. According to Goinvest.com CTO Mohammed Rashid, ”Microsoft can come in and provide you with a low-cost solution, and you definitely have a leg up, [compared to] when you had to buy your own transaction-processing monitor and message queue [software]. It's great for companies that are starting up to have that integrated environment.“
But, Rashid adds, the need to customise Microsoft products to work with customers' Solaris and Linux environments ”holds you back as you grow“. By contrast, Dell's Smith claims that none of his customers has complained to him about the Windows 2000 installations they have put in. At the absolute high end where mainframes rule, Windows 2000 still has a long way to go to convince potential buyers they can dispense with their existing set-up. As with most Microsoft products, each new release of the Windows server operating system is becoming more and more scalable and powerful. But while Windows 2000 is making greater in-roads into the high end than NT 4.0 or NT 3.51 did, it may take until the delivery of Windows 2002 or its successor for Microsoft to really demonstrate mainframe-class scalability and reliability.
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