Windows NT vs. Unix: The Chase Is On!
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Independent software vendors (ISVs) are rallying behind NT as a rival application server platform for database management, transaction processing, business processes and Internet/intranet services, especially for small-to-midsize markets, for a number of reasons:
· Windows NT supports the Intel x86 architecture, creating a generous range of hardware options. Microsoft also supports Digital Equipment Corp.'s powerful Alpha architecture with NT.
· Windows NT not only supports multitasking and protected memory, it also offers an industry-standard API for developing applications. Unlike writing Unix applications, an ISV isn't forced to decide which vendor's API to support for NT applications. The NT API is identical in all copies of Windows NT--and porting to a different architecture (such as Digital's Alpha) involves nothing more than recompiling the code, not rewriting the application.
· Windows NT
Server provides native file and print services for Windows workstations out of the box. Microsoft's goal is to provide a single platform solution for
all server needs (see "NOS: Stepping Up to Big Challenges," December 1, 1996, page 60). However, even though Microsoft has made a considerable push toward TCP/IP networking, these file and print services are still based on antiquated Server Message Block (SMB) and NetBIOS.
· Windows NT's standard graphical user interface and slew of GUI-based management applications simplify server administration, theoretically reducing support costs.
· Microsoft's stature as a major industry player virtually ensures widespread adoption of the NT platform. Furthermore, NT is built to be portable. By creating a hardware abstraction layer, Microsoft helps make differences in hardware platform a non-issue to the network operating system.
Net Management's Best Friend
In our Syracuse University lab, where we test and use lot of enterprise-class network m
anagement software, we are often faced with choosing to run some of the newer versions of these products on Windows NT or on Unix. Although these aren't necessarily large-scale applications, they do have some hefty requirements, and we consider them to be midsized applications for a normal Unix or PC server to have to run. So to build another data point in the NT/Unix comparison, we put a Windows NT version of a Cabletron Systems' SPECTRUM Enterprise manager network management platform to the test against its Unix equivalent running on SunSoft's Solaris. To highlight one aspect of the performance issue, we performed in-depth testing of a specialized application originally designed to run under Unix to determine the feasibility of using NT as a network management platform.
We chose Cabletron Systems' SPECTRUM Enterprise Manager network management platform for measuring performance because SPECTRUM runs on both Windows NT and SunSoft's Solaris. The code base is extremely similar on both platforms and databas
es can easily be saved and loaded between platforms. SPECTRUM also offers a powerful toolkit to measure performance of the database server, as well as the ab
ility to completely separate the server functions from the display functions (SpectroSERVER and SpectroGRAPH).
In terms of performance for large network management applications like Cabletron's SPECTRUM, NT plays the role of a medium-to-large scale application server. It must be up to the task of running several concurrent processing and memory-intensive tasks, such as constantly running Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) queries to test connectivity; maintaining a large database of device models, containing information on network nodes and related interfaces; and running complex artificial intelligence code that filters incoming data and tries to determine the cause of network problems.
We tracked CPU utilization, polling latencies and interactive response time--and because we didn't simply benchmark each platform's performance--our result
s are qualitative, not quantitative. To our surprise, NT held its own quite nicely.
We ran Unix and NT versions of Cabletron's SPECTRUM Enterprise Manager network management platform, one on a dual-processor, 50-MHz Sun Microsystems' SPARCserver running SunSoft's Solaris 2.4 and the other on a Pentium Pro 200-MHz server running Windows NT 3.5.1; both had 128 MB of RAM and similar disks. We evaluated both platforms for a month, incrementally discovering sections of Syracuse University's network.
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