Slashdot Mirror
NOS Crossroads
Mark Wright sent us a link to some benchmarks over at ZD Net that
examines assorted
NOS Options.
NT is benched, as is Solaris, Netware and Linux. Linux holds
up quite poorly in this review.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Hee-hee. I just went shopping. I didn't try to cook the number; I simply went looking for a reasonable workgroup server as a test of the statement that Sun equipment would be "many times more expensive than the Wintel setup".
Here's the answer:-- quote from sun.com ------------------------------ 4,495.00 (US$)
Enterprise 5, 333MHz w/ 2MB ECache, 128MB DRAM, PGX24
graphics, 9GB disk, 1.44MB floppy, 32X CD-ROM, Solaris
7 installed and a Server Right-To-Use (RTU) license
-- quote from dell.com ------------------------------ 5,027.00 (US$)
Dell PowerEdge 4300, Pentium II 400MHz/512MHz Cache, 128MB
RAM, 9GB disk, 14/32X SCSI CD-ROM, 1.44MB Floppy, Intel Pro
100+ Ethernet NIC, Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
So ... you can argue, up/down this option, add this, subtract this, or 'you can get better deals', etc. but clearly it is not many times more expensive to buy a Sparc system.
If you look SPECWeb http://www.spec.org/osg/web96/results/ - another place Linux doesn't play - you'll notice that Sun actually performs better on x86 hardware than Sparc.
Gee, so a Windows NT fileserver can save a few milliseconds over a Linux fileserver? Oh, and the quad-Pentium NT webserver that I can't afford can save a few milliseconds serving up static web page content?
Well, I DON'T CARE, because I don't have to drive to the office at 3:00 am to reboot the Linux server. That's worth a lot more to me than those milliseconds.
While we're doing these benchmarks, let's quit serving up static web pages and start serving up some CGI-generated content. Watch what happens to NT then, folks.
Yeah, I'm ranting and I'm hiding behind AC, but I'm also speaking from experience.
Linux zealots aren't born. NT MAKES THEM!
^^ Feel free to use the above as a sig. ^^
If you follow the link to the PC Week lab notes, you see that Linux outperformed NT when using NT Workstation clients on the SMB tests. So, the real results aren't so bad. As far the NetBench stuff, that is more a test of Apache vs. other Web servers rather than Linux vs. other NOS's. They need to put squid or some other cache in front of Apache; or maybe use Zeus. And really, if you are going to test Enterprise readiness, reliablility and predictability are the most valued attributes of an Enterprise OS. IMHO, reliability should account for at least 65% of any scorecard.
Loading a new process in NT is slow and memory-intensive. Microsoft's own tech notes admit this (do a search on "CGI" in MS TechNet). Linux is faster at running a new process.
This, BTW, is one of the reasons Microsoft pushes Active Server Pages and ISAPI. The user code runs in the same process space as IIS (unless you use MTS) and doesn't have to be loaded each time it's called.
Predictions --
1. A comparison of CGI-generated content could well show NT IIS getting spanked in terms of pure speed.
2. Microsoft would challenge the results, saying that the benchmarkers should have been using ASP or ISAPI. They would probably throw in snide remarks about CGI being "old technology".
Your point is very important. With more sites becoming interactive (esp. the "enterprise" sites which these benchmarks target), static page delivery should be met with a big yawn.
"and Linux, which requires far less hardware than the other NOSes and could probably be ported to
solar-powered calculators,"
I keep asking myself, when these people
do benchmarks, why do they use quad cpu
boxen when they know linux doesn't work
so hot with em?
Why not assign each OS a set number of dollars,
and spend it the best way for the OS.
NT can get a quad 500mhz pentium 3 box,
and linux can get a cluster of PII 450 boxes....
Posted by Jeremy Allison - Samba Team:
0 ,401974,00.html
:-). I can beat NT comfortably
> Now, as both Solaris and Linux had nearly
> identical graphs for the NetBench part, and
> both were using Samba, I think we know where
> the bottleneck there is...
Err, actually no. The bottleneck isn't Samba.
If you look carefully at the Solaris analysis at page :
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/jumps/0,427
You'll find this interesting quote :
"To isolate the disk subsystem as a bottleneck, we created a
temporary RAM disk to hold workload files, effectively
eliminating the need to hit the RAID array for data. In this
configuration, the powerful capabilities of Solaris 7's networking
kernel were unleashed--to the tune of 360M bps on NetBench."
What this means is that when Samba is run on a very tuned SMP
OS such as Solaris (ignoring the disk subsystem for the moment)
then Samba can produce numbers that out perform *all* the other
systems (the peak NT number is around 340 I think). What is killing
Solaris here is their awful disk system. If they had a decent disk
file system they would have had beaten NT when using Samba to
serve Win95 clients as their SMP is so good.
This corresponds well with the results I get in the SGI labs
using IRIX, which is also a highly tuned SMP OS (but with a
better disk file system, XFS
using Samba and IRIX on an SMP box, but IRIX only runs on MIPS
boxes from SGI.
What this means for Linux is that we need to do more work
on the SMP scaling in the Linux kernel, as Samba isn't the
bottleneck here. I'm doing a lot of work on userland caching
at the moment to help out on the Samba side, but Linux just
needs a bit more SMP work. Don't worry, it's coming (I know
*lots* of people working on this)........
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Common guys, that D for Solaris in RAID support should have been a dead giveaway that something is screwy about this article.
Besides, people who care about their data enough to use RAID aren't going to be going through the OS (beyond the SCSI subsystem) to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I develop intranet apps for a living and I wonder why they keep testing "Enterprise" webservers only using static pages. Most of the load on any webserver is going to be on generation of dynamic content. I don't Care if you are using CGI, Java serverlets, mod_perl or whatever.
In most real applications static files will clog the network pipe before it hits the CPU. And as been noted there are some unix webservers that can serve static pages much faster than apache.
But we do need to document all of this better.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
They make linux's flexibility sound like a disadvantage. Maybe for people that lack the money/brains, but to my mind enterprise sized systems would be maintained by people with a clue. Solaris ain't no cinch to setup either.
Saying that NT is better than Solaris is just plain dishonest. Funny how they attack linux for poor SMP support but then gloss over the huge difference in NT vrs Solaris SMP support.
Try remote administration of NT boxes you turkies, then tell me unices are hard to maintain remotely.
The article isn't that bad I guess, once you realise that it is just another marketing driven review.
For example, when testing the performance of the Apache Web server, which comes bundled with most Linux distributions, we noticed a speed degradation while ramping up clients. After careful examination of the code, we found that the problem related to the number of processes that were immediately spawned by Apache. We edited a parameter in Apache's configuration file to compensate.
Right, "after careful examination of the code" but we forgot to read about the StartServers directive in the manual. Benchmarking people are not going to spend time reading manuals to help linux look good, especially if the commercial products running on the other platforms have nice GUI interfaces for setting these things. How about a "Ready for Benchmark" flag that can only be set if the operator has modified certain things and have a script that can quickly compile a report of all settings that can be published along with the findings?
There were some other things I thought were kinda strange...I'll concentrate on Solaris here.
For Solaris they actually used Solaris on Intel, which is fair enough considering they were looking at doing stuff on the same hardware, but isn't that good for 'real world' situations (A comparison with a Sun E450 would have been interesting) because most people who use Solaris use it on Sun hardware. Some things are a bit unclear - they seem to say they got the Solaris box from Sun, even though Sun don't sell Intel based boxes themselves - they get OEMs to do that. (actually, they correct that later, saying that Sun brought in a Dell PowerEdge box) They don't say when they got the box, but they did mention Sun's Project Cascade (think Samba for Solaris) but didn't mention that products for this are now available (well, availability was annouced a few weeks back, though I don't know about x86 versions).
They gave Solaris (on Intel) a D on RAID due to lack of support for PCI cards (not sure how fair that is) which is kinda funny when Solaris on SPARC has about the best and most reliable RAID setup out there, according to people I've talked to.(NetApps were also highly praised btw) They then criticize Sun for being 'expensive' (the hardware is, sure), when they were not even testing Sun hardware, while Solaris itself is actually very cheap for a commercial OS. (NT is only cheaper than Solaris when your NT box has no clients) They then have contradictory stuff about Solaris - stuck in the datacenter on some pages (the main ones), while on other pages (the Solaris specific ones) they give a different picture...
Btw, in the final page about Solaris they mention a report from the Standish group, but they don't give a URL to it. It's available here - Solaris Vs NT.
about this review.
:)
a) RAID controllers IIRC there are some RAID controllers which work beautifully in Linux and others which are in alpha drivers (such as the one MindCraft used...). Does anyone know which ones are which, and where the one ZD used fits in?
b) Througput for Linux peaked at exactly 200Mbps. Anyone else find that suspicious? As if they only had 2 NICs going in Linux? Why on earth should the kernel choose such a nice round number at which to pan out?
c) Static Pages this has been mentioned before, but it's very pertinent. The only thing that counts is dynamic content. Anyone know how the Apache mod_asp performs?
d) Multiprocessing i386 I'm sorry. When you're spending $20k on a computer, you buy a Sun Ultra-60, run Solaris on it, and end the question there. Intel machines suck at high-end multiprocessing. And Linux will kick anyone's ass on a dual box
I don't think the article was really that bad. It acknowledged that RedHat was not the only Linux Distribution (even though that was the only one they tried) and the referred to Linux by its kernel version rather than the version of the distribution. OK it made Linux sound more difficult than it really is but lets put it this way. If you're using Linux as a network operating system you should be paying staff who know what they're doing not people who perhaps go for, lets say, NT just because it's easy for them in the short term (although they have problems later).
My main annoyance is the use of the word FREEWARE when they mean free software or open source. Freeware refers to anything free of charge - including binary only software. Linux can be freeware in a sense but can also be distributed value-added (i.e. a boxed set distribution with support and printed docs). People who hear that Linux is freeware can then be confused when they see it on sale in a shop.
--
I read the dead tree edition of this article yesterday (with sidebars spotlighting a user of each NOS, and reasons why they went there), and it's a pretty solid review. On lower-end hardware, Linux blows the doors off NT, but at this point, NT runs faster on the king-size industrial hardware (like the boxes they tested on). Also, ZD tested a RedHat 5.2 distro upgraded to the 2.2 kernel - not a lot of stuff is optimized for the newer kernel. Off RedHat 6.0 or one of the other 2.2-based distros, the numbers would probably be somewhat better.
That said, it's obvious that the next step for Linux is better "enterprise" hardware support, and easier configuration/tuning for the non-wizard. The configuration issue has been at the top of people's lists for a while, but it's not solved yet (I suspect because so many of the developers can configure from a text file in their sleep). NT does nothing truly well (it's a decent desktop OS, but that's about it), but in a benchmark environment where stability isn't measured, it does nothing too badly. So it scores well, In my experience (YMMV), I've found that when running NT in a pretty vanilla software environment, on Compaq hardware, with only a task or two per box, it's pretty stable (no crashes in day-to day use, reboot to defrag memory every month or so). Of course that's not how Microsoft positions it, or they wouldn't sell the BackOffice suite as a single SKU. When you run all the BackOffice components at once, it's gonna crash, and crash hard & often.
NetWare, for pure file and print services, is still a really fast engine - NLM's suck hard and it'll be a while before you see NetWare services rewritten in Java, but their Java interpreter is pretty good. They've also worked hard on tuning their web server for performance, and it's integration with NDS is a pretty slick feature. The only thing I wasn't clear on from feading the benchmark specs was what file system they used - their older FAT system (which is real fast if you have the RAM, but pretty risky in a crash) or their new journalling file system, which I don't believe is quite as fast yet.
As for Sun, this is the first real bench I've seen on their Intel version - hopefully Sun doesn't keep ignoring it for the Sparc version. Solaris, with better hardware support, could be quite a nice NT killer in the server space
All in all, it was a pretty balanced review that did a good job of highlighting strengths and weaknesses both. It'll be interesting to see how the vendors react.
By the way, in the same issue PCWeek also reviews Win2K Beta 3. In a nutshell: The Workstation version is pretty close and pretty solid - the Server version sucks eggs.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Articles like this, which show some potential weaknesses with Linux, are excellent guides for the developers to continue refining the already excellent OS that Linux is.
It pointed out that:
- Linux + Apache maxes out when it gets 2000 HTTP requests a second
- Linux + Apache maxes out when it is transferring 200 Mbps a second
These kind of benchmarks, although unpleasant to read, have worked to improve Linux in the past. The fact that Apache no longer attempts to perform a slow getaddrbyname (reverse DNS lookup) operation every time someone requests a web page is the result of benchmarks showing NT web servers beating the socks off of Linux web servers that did this inefficient operation.The web page tunelinux.com is the result of the much-discussed Mindcraft study.
Linus fixed a problem with Linux yielding threads when it was shown by an informal benchmark that NT was much faster when yielding threads in a tight loop. Of course, this being a Usenet test, a long flame war started arguing whether the test was legitimate. Linus had the very mature comment that "Anything that could objectively make Linux look bad should be fixed" (or words to that effect).
My only objection to these ZDNET studies is that they do not always explain in sufficient detail their testing methodology. As long as their story explains their testing methodology, these articles should be studied by the developers with a fine tooth comb.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
http://www5.zd net.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,387506,00. html Not a totally cluefull article, (parts of it are actually quite scary - "Apache for OpenLinux is superior to Apache for RedHat", etc.) but for those suggesting they run single CPU benchmarks to see Linux shine, it's a start. It's funny there's been no mention of this reviewer's findings since.
"I don't think I ain't" -Thompson's Corollary to Descartes
From what I've read these past few months, Threads under Linux seem to be somewhat problematic, else the Apache team would be using them. This is another area that will be improved upon in the upcomming months. Instead of sticking our heads in the sand,lets identify what needs work and improve upon it. This is Linux's strength. 3 months from now we can run the benchmarks again and see a drastic improvement, else we can just keep on coding until we get it right. Really it's not a question of 'if' but one of 'when'. We are in control of our own fate, as we have the source :).
You have been assimilated.
Who has the guts to organize and/or sponsor such an event? Magazines would be welcome.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I wouldn't say that this was a bad review, especially considering that ZD would have dismissed Linux out of hand scarcely a year ago. Linux is harder to configure than NT, tuning information is a lot harder to find, finding a patch to match your kernel revision is an unholy pain in the butt, and you do need more competent staff to administer it than you do with NT's point-and-drool interface. This is not news. To their credit, they did say -- essentially -- that the higher learning curve associated with Linux is repaid by greater power and flexibility. Considering what an big corporate lackey ZD is, that's no small admission.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
For example, the ability to serve lots of hits per second on static web pages from a single box has no relevance to real-life web sites. At 1000 hits per second, a single Linux machine can serve about as many hits per second in these benchmarks as the whole Microsoft web site receives. That seems more than enough, and it's clearly not where real web sites are hitting their limitations (Microsoft uses dozens of their machines for their web site). I think the reason why Microsoft like this kind of benchmark is because it's easy to tune the OS for, even if it has little impact on actual web operations.
Also, the importance of SMP is overrated: the need for SMP on NT and some other systems arises often simply from licensing and system management issues; in many server applications, separate machines are preferable.
The benchmarks also don't take into account cost/performance. ZD claims "NT excels in NetBench". But actually, it only does 50% better for a price of at least $800 more. For that amount of money, you can buy another Linux machine and double Linux performance.
Most importantly, however, I think it is wrong to consider Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX systems to be "competitors". People can (and do) run mixed UNIX environments. For example, I might use Linux for all the web servers and an AIX machine for running a DB2 enterprise database that backs it all. Using Linux means there are lots of directions to grow in and lots of compatible commercial vendors to choose from.
If I develop for NT, I'm stuck when NT runs out of steam on its measly 4 or 8 processor Intel boxes, or when it runs out of its 3G address space. With NT, there is nothing to upgrade to.
Linux clearly isn't for everybody or everything. Only Microsoft seems to have the hubris of thinking that a single OS (theirs) can work well for everybody. Linux is part of a family of operating systems from different vendors that are interoperable and mostly compatible, and that only as a group cover most needs from embedded systems to mainframes. But within its own niche, R/D desktop applications, server farms, and small to medium servers, Linux is actually quite good.
Yeah! (pointless-disgruntled-ex-employee-rant follows, feel free to totally ignore it)... Another example of a high traffic website using Linux (Redhat to be exact) is Wells Fargo. With their online banking, loan apps and internal access (at least when I was there), I think it holds up pretty good... What is ironic ( to me) is that at one particular call center (I can't say where, but it is in the NW), the internal network is on NT and when I worked there, it crashed at least 1-2 times a day, sometimes more. The lowest bidder won when it came to deciding who and what the new network was set up on. I'm done now.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
The ZDNet People laid out there criteria as if ... myself comparing spoken languages.
... A ... B ... B+
they were users of Windows. Ability to use SMB,
"Ease" of Setup, "Ease" of Optimization, Application Support(who needs a word processor on a server?), etc. I give 'em credit for running a test that includes multiple OSes, but this test has the validity of say
English
I talk good English
French
some of my friends have been to France
Spanish
I heard two people speak it once. and they seemed to understand each other.
etc etc etc etc
I was looking forward to (finally) seeing FreeBSD pit against the "whole gang": Linux, Solaris, NT. Like Linux and Solaris, the userland applications would be mostly the same: Samba and Apache. That leaves just the kernel for comparison.
cpeterso
Here you go:
http://www.zdnet.com/sr/s tories/issue/0,4537,387506,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/s r/stories/infopack/0,5483,396321,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/s r/stories/infopack/0,5483,398022,00.html
-slams
-slams
Why is it that EVERY time a benchmark comes out which claims that Linux doesn't perform as well as other OSes, people claim that it was because of biased testing? Perhaps people had justification for bashing Mindcraft's tests, but this evaluation seems to have been done very well.
Even Linus says that, thus far, Linux had been developed with stability and maintainance in mind, not necessarily raw performance. Also, for the most part, linux developers haven't had the resources to spend on enterprise class servers for use in performance testing and coding. This is probably why Linux always seems to be the best performer on relatively inexpensive machines -- it has been developed and tuned almost exclusively on them.
I think that most people agree that Linux has a long way to go before it will be the best (performance-wise). The fact that is is GPLed will certainly help, but we need people (companies) with the resources to spend on developing Linux with a goal of performance. It will probably take some time before linux coders stop playing catch-up (i.e. trying to support all the devices and functionality of other operating systems) and start working hard on optimizations.
Frankly, I'm not even sure that a "bazaar" model of development can support this goal. In many cases, when you are writing code (esp. systems code) with a goal of squeezing the best possibly performance out of it, some of the most effective optimizations are nearly incomprehensible to people who haven't spent months examining all of the subtle interactions which make the optimization so effective. Since I doubt that Linus want's a kernel filled with magic that only a few wizards understand, such optimizations may never make it into the kernel (unless the kernel forks). These are the things which turn into debugging nightmares later on. I'll bet that both the reason for the speed of NT compared to Linux as well as its notorious instability are because of this.
Incidentally, no flames please. I've been running Linux exclusively on my machine for a couple years now; that means none of that "well, I still boot Windows occasionally to run games" crap either. I just think that we should takes examine these published benchmarks for valid points and see what we can to do improve our scores. This doesn't necessarily mean benchmark specific tuning (which is what most companies do) either. Its only that just screaming "FUD!!!" doesn't accomplish anything. Hopefully, in a couple years, Linux will be so ripped that it will be difficult for someone to de-tune Linux to make other OSes appear better.
-nooM
what did you expect? that linux would win?
remember the phrase first they ignore you, then they laugh at you. then they fight you. then you win.
well... this is the fight part. and it is war...
dont expect it to end anytime soon.
Ex Libris Veritas
> If Novell supplied NetWare with a real SMP
;-)
> kernel, NetWare's performance would be
> show-stopping.
Netware 4.x and older really had a problem with SMP, especially if Maximum Service Processes was set too low, but Netware 5.x is a different kettle of fish. It's SMP is very damn good.
> Unfortunately, in its current state, NetWare
> leaves a lot to be desired not only in
> scalability but also in application support.
Netware 5.x doesn't have many applications ported to it, unless you count such small things as Oracle and Notes.
> Couple this with Novell's decision to divorce
> great applications such as ZENworks and Novell
> Directory Services from NetWare, and the value
> proposition for NetWare becomes even murkier
I'm sorry, NDS isn't part of Netware 5.x ? or even 4.x?????? Did these people even install this product? ZEN is bundled with Netware 5.x [admitedly without the Helpdesk or Remote Control functionality] as well. And does a damn fine job. Heck, it's even bundled in the latest Win32 client d/ls.
Only thing I'm dissapointed with in Netware 5.x is the fact that we still don't have a decent Open Source client. Hell, even a closed source client would tide me over.
This is not to abuse the excellent work of the ppl behind such wonders as NCPFS and MARS-NWE, or even Caldera for their client, but we really do need a proper NDS PAM plugin, and KDE/GNOME integration would be good
Netware -> Excellent choice if your too chicken for unix, and haven't seen the light of Open Source. Y2K compliant, has been for over a year.
Unix -> Power. Flexibility. Scalability. UNIX is your friend. Naturally Y2K compliant.
NT -> Lack of stability. Lack of Y2K compliance. Lack of Power. Lack of decent command line driven programs. Pretty though. "Polly wanna Cracker?". Excuse the pun.
-- James "Bragi" Deucker Patrician of Networks
How come I did not read the word 'stability' even once in the article?
I'm tired, but in the linux review linked to from this article something along the lines of "Comercial software vendors would be wise to standerdise on a particular distrabution."
This seems like quite a bad idea to me. It would fragment OS further if, for example, your enterprise word processing app only ran on Caldera but the remote administration package you needed was RedHat only.
Test server:
4 Pentium II/III CPUs
4 Intel NICs
RAID l5
2G RAM
Apache/Samba/no kernel tweaks
Why is it that all companies insist on picking hardware on which Linux performs the poorest? It seems our friends at ZD have been chatting with our friends at Mindcraft methinks (or perhaps M$ themselves).
Despite the fact that we seem to compare more favorably in this study than we did in the Mindcraft study, there is an extrememly important lesson we need to take away from this "losing in the benchmarks" experience as of late: we need to take these deficiencies and turn them into future strengths.
It was put very well by Linus himself in a previous poster's message. To paraphrase, anything that can be interpreted as a weakness in Linux by a media or testing agency must be improved. These are worthy pusuits, and if we keep doing them at the rate they are discovered, (unlike our M$ friends), we will eventually surpass all other OSes in every respect that matters.
We should probably place a particular emphasis on improving our SMP code, because that's the area we probably have the most to gain. All those other driver optimizations will only help us if by some luck the testing agency picks the same ones.
Anyways, I hope everyone won't get discouraged over this recent benchmarking FUD. The acceptance of good things is not always an easy road.
The opinions I post here have nothing to do with my employer.
I say, PHBs most likely won't even read articles like this, but skip directly to the "executive summary" or whatever, where they can see which OS was "the best".
Doesn't this harm RedHat's business? Since they have a lot of cash right now, why not paying for independent benchmark tests? They could do all sorts of interesting tests, like Linux vs. NT on single processor machines, or the "best solution for a fixed amount of cash" test.
I even know about some lab that's particularly skilled at making your products look good in tests. Mindcraft-something, was the name, I think. The hats should give them a call.
Erm... may I point out that Apache is, although not
multithreaded in the sense of multiple threads in
one process space, a multiprocess webserver?
That means any SMP is taken full advantage of!
I often find those buzzword-deep remarks about multithreading
rather annoying, as the only reason IMHO it's hyped so much
these days is because NT is so bad at IPC and creating processes.
Also, what buggers me is the silly idea in the article
that Apache would need to fork() for each request. This is nonsense, as
you can configure as much pre-spawned servers as you want! So the reason why they suppose why apache whould perform worse than a multithreaded server escapes me. As to CGI, forget it, that _does_ need a fork(),execve() for each request. Rather, go fastcgi...! This way, application services can be prespawned too and reused between requests. Just my Hfl. 0.05...
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
What are you, nuts? If anything there is too much you can configure in Solaris. For starters:
A collection of tuning papers and resources
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
"But today, with Ingo Molnar's Software-RAID patches, Linux outperforms any hardware-RAID solution for a fraction of the cost."
Wait a minute. If you mean cost-performance, that is one thing, but sheer power outperformance? You mean your software RAID patches are going to outperform my Compaq SmartRAID with 16 Mb of battery-backed cache directly on the UltraSCSI bus?
No way. No how. Hardware RAID allows for some nice cache tricks that can increase speed and reliability.
Software RAID has potential for more flexability and certainly a better cost/performance ratio.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
And again they are using 4 intel ethernet adapters, probably configured to do some sort of striping/loadsharing/whatever .. i think that's what gives NT it's edge in every benchmark.. .. watch for the 4 ethernets :(
..
I think there's going to be a lot more like this
It shouldn't be to hard to implement into linux, bind 1 ip to 4 ethernets and send through whichever one is free