Business Server Development and NT 5.0

Since the Pentium Pro processor's introduction in late 1995, the Intel server platform hasn't changed much. Innovations such as the adoption of Ultra Wide SCSI have introduced evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change. In 1997 (a sleepy time for business server development), the primary server platform remained Pentium Pro-based and ran Windows NT Server 4.0. Late 1998, however, will bring significant change to the business server universe as major advances in the Intel server platform and NT Server 5.0 chart a direct course for your network. In this article, I'll examine some important server hardware changes coming in late 1998 and the key features of NT Server 5.0. I'll look at how these hardware and operating system (OS) changes will affect the typical NT server platform and suggest some ways you can choose among them to customize your system.

Processor Technology
The fastest Intel processors are in the Pentium II family. The exceptions to this generalization are 4-way servers that use the Pentium Pro processor. Besides clock speed, the main difference between Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors is the speed and size of the secondary, or Level 2, cache. Pentium Pro offers up to 1MB of Level 2 cache that runs at the same speed as the processor; Pentium II is limited to 512KB of Level 2 cache that runs at half the processor's speed. On desktops, the higher clock speed of a Pentium II compensates for the slower cache. However, on multiprocessor servers where cache performance is mission critical, a Pentium II processor's higher clock speed does not compensate for the slower cache.

The new Xeon processors start at 400MHz and will offer even faster speeds by the end of the year.

The next generation of Pentium II technology, the Pentium II Xeon, targets the problem of limited cache speed by offering full-speed caches of up to 2MB per processor. The new Xeon processors start at 400MHz and will offer even faster speeds by the end of the year. As processor speed increases, other system components must become faster as well. Therefore, the new generation of Pentium II processors increases memory bus bandwidth from 528 MB per second (MBps) to 800MBps by increasing the bus frequency from 66MHz to 100MHz. These increases are essential to enable 4-way systems to scale well.

When Intel introduced the Pentium Pro processor and its supporting chipsets, this technology allowed standardization of the basic design of 4-way Intel servers. The next generation of Pentium II processors will likely serve a similar crucial role in standardizing the design of 8-way servers. Intel recently moved toward controlling the 8-way market by buying both Corollary's 8-way ProFusion design and NCR's OctaScale design. Axil, the only other developer of 8-way Xeon technology, recently closed its doors. A consequence might be premium prices for 8-way servers.

Eight-way systems are not the end of the line, though. Unisys recently announced its intent to market a 32-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server that uses Pentium II Xeon technology on crossbar system architecture and measures memory bandwidth in GBs. (This monster won't be available in the near future, however.) To learn more about the new generation of Pentium II processors, go to Intel's Web site (http://www.developer .intel.com/design/PentiumII).

Storage and I/O Subsystems
Server storage has been largely SCSI-based for almost a decade, and performance has increased incrementally over that time. SCSI has leapt from 5MBps to a whopping 40MBps of bandwidth. Ten years ago, Intel servers used a 386 processor, usually supported no more than 64MB of memory, and came with a 100MB hard disk. By the end of 1998, a server will have four next-generation Pentium II processors, as much as 8GB of memory, and hundreds of GBs of disk storage. Clearly, storage I/O subsystem design must change if the next generation of servers is not to be bound by I/O. Two technologies will emerge in 1998 to relieve the looming I/O bottleneck: Ultra2 SCSI and fibre channel storage subsystems.

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