SQL Server Magazine

Now What?
If you're considering signing a purchase order for an 8-way system, a performance improvement of 34 percent will most likely give you pause. After all, 8-way systems aren't 34 percent more expensive than 4-way systems. In fact, an 8-way system currently costs at least two or three times the price of a similarly configured 4-way system.

Eight-way systems aren't economic bargains. However, they are practical in a few situations.

You might run an application that scales well to an 8-way environment. Benchmark tests don't reflect the behavior of every application. Some applications probably scale better than 34 percent in 8-way configurations. Before upgrading to an 8-way system, have your software or hardware vendor prove to you that your applications scale to an 8-way environment.

Perhaps you need every drop of performance you can squeeze out of a system. You might have a monolithic application that you can't partition or spread across multiple systems (e.g., a huge database). If you've reached your 4-way system's performance limit, a 34 percent performance increase might look good at any price.

Maybe you want to consolidate your servers. You can effectively use an 8-way system to consolidate multiple servers into one server, provided that you establish processor affinities for the applications you want to run. If you load your applications and let NT handle the processor management, you're asking for trouble. You'll get better performance if you set affinities for your applications (e.g., you assign two processors to Internet Information Server--IIS, four processors to SQL Server, and two processors to NT). You can set processor affinities through the Registry or with third-party software tools.

You might run applications that aren't CPU intensive. Scalability works differently with different applications. If you have an application that is disk and network bound, you can improve performance if you use an 8-way system with processor affinities tuned to balance OS performance, application performance, disk I/O, and network I/O. In this case, having more processors lets you dedicate processor resources to specific bottlenecks in your applications. To take advantage of extra processors, you must know how to optimally tune your applications.

If none of these situations applies to you, I recommend that you deploy 4-way or 6-way systems with 4GB of RAM running NTS/E. New hardware technology (i.e., new processors) will enter the 4-way and 6-way market long before it reaches 8-way systems. The performance difference between 4-way, 6-way, and 8-way systems will proba-bly decrease when the new 4-way and 6-way systems hit the market (and increase when the same technology reaches 8-way systems).

You can't cure all your performance problems with an 8-way system. These systems have a place in the NT industry, but they might not have a place in your environment. Only you can decide whether your application environment will benefit from the increased power of eight processors or whether eight processors can fix bottlenecks in your applications. If you decide your environment needs an 8-way system, go ahead and sign that purchase order. Otherwise, consider the price and performance benefits of the new 4-way and 6-way systems.

If you need the computing power of an 8-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server, consider Data General's AViiON 8600. This easy-to-use, enterprise-level server uses Adaptive Memory Crossbar architecture to scale as many as eight 200MHz Pentium Pro processors and 8GB of RAM.

Special Delivery
The Windows NT Magazine Lab's test unit came with the maximum eight 200MHz Pentium Pro processors, 1MB Level-2 cache, 4GB of RAM, a 3.5" drive, a CD-ROM drive, an internal IDE 4GB hard disk (boot disk), an STB Nitro 3-D video graphics card, 10 Seagate Cheetah 9GB SCSI hard disks, and a Mylex DAC960 Disk Array Controller. Data General offers various configurations for its AViiON servers, such as two processors to eight processors, 128MB to 8GB of RAM, and space for multiple CLARiiON disk arrays.

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