Re: Active Server Pages

["Nathan M. Andelin" <nathanma@xxxxxxxxx>]

Booth,

My question addressed the issue of reliability, rather load distribution.
In my experience, the best way to keep an NT server running is to limit the
number of applications it hosts.

In my experience, the more applications you integrate into a single NT
server, the less reliable it gets.  The reliability problem seems to get
bigger when you try to integrate components from multiple vendors.  So, the
server may have extra capacity that goes unused for the sake of reliability.

But, to answer your question about load distribution, I tend to accept the
Gartner group study that concluded that fewer servers results in lower cost
of ownership.  This is the common justification for the AS/400 over NT.
People look at the price / performance ratio of the NT server and see that
its much better than an AS/400.  But, they don't consider the operational
and support costs.  It takes fewer people to run an AS/400, so the cost of
ownership is actually less than running multiple NT servers.

But, I like the idea of having a development box separate from a production
box, so developers can do things you wouldn't normally want to do in an
integrated environment, such as stress test a new web application.

Regarding LPAR, I don't really understand it well enough to comment.


>Let me ask the next question then.  Is that plan of distributing the work
>load a poor plan?  Does it increase operational problems like security and
>user profiles, or does it lessen them?  Are hardware costs more or do they
>just have smaller boxes and therefore more disk arms?   Is this really a
>matter of having your eggs in  several baskets vs. having all your eggs in
>one basket and watching that basket closely?

>I am an AS/400 bigot but that doesn't mean I have to be an AS/400 idiot.
>If distributing loads across a  multi-box architecture is a good plan,
>then why not do it with a bunch of AS/400 boxes?  For instance, why does
>anyone choose LPAR vs. some more boxes.




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