Microsoft Admits NT Trails Solaris

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

July 28, 1998 (12:00 AM EDT)

NEW ORLEANS -- Windows NT has made strides, but it still lags significantly behind Sun Microsystems' Solaris in terms of performance in the enterprise, Microsoft officials quietly acknowledged last weekend at the Microsoft Global Summit.

Speaking at the company's (company profile) annual sales meeting here in New Orleans, Microsoft officials said in terms of "server availability," there is much ground to make up between NT and Solaris.

In terms of "server years," where one server runs for 12 months or 12 servers run one month, there are 20 or more reboots on NT vs. "single-digit" reboots for Solaris, an attendee told CRN. The results were part of a presentation given by a Microsoft executive at the summit.

However, Microsoft officials, based in Redmond, Wash., said they knew of no such survey comparing NT with Solaris, but maintained NT holds its own in the fray. Other Microsoft executives were still in New Orleans for the meeting and could not be reached for comment.

But the gap between NT and Solaris is hardly news to value-added resellers in the outside world. "We have a Solaris box that hasn't been rebooted in two years," said James Domengeaux, president of Comspace.Com, a Houston-based Web reseller. In comparison, NT servers are rebooted often, he said. "That's a problem especially in e-commerce if you're talking transactions per second, because how many orders do you miss?" he said.

Rebooting Madness
Of course, rebooting is a tricky measure. "When NT crashes, sometimes it's due to the OS, sometimes the network, sometimes the virus scanner they don't even make. The question is, how often is the reboot happening because you just applied a service pack and have to reboot?" said the Global Summit attendee.

Also, people coming to NT from Win 95 often reboot because it's "easier to do that than figure out what happened," he said.

To bulk up NT for the enterprise, Microsoft will increase beta-testing of Service Pack updates and of key server applications such as Lotus Domino and SAP R/3, and even Microsoft BackOffice on the OS, according to summit attendees.

Microsoft is now beta-testing Service Pack 4.0 for Win 4.0. It is a broad external beta, like Service Pack 3. In Service Pack 2, many customers experienced serious glitches, and the broader beta was designed to help correct those problems before they reached the market.

Jeff Price, lead product manager for Windows NT Server, said he was unaware of plans to escalate beta-testing and said the company started adding muscle to the service-pack-testing program 18 months ago, when longer test cycles were instituted and more testers added. But solution providers contacted by CRN knew nothing of those measures.

"The macro focus here is there is nothing new about our focus on quality," Price said. "Specifically, with regard to NT, it has always been there. As NT has moved into more and more mission-critical environments, we've pumped that up over time our process for delivering quality product.

"We are focusing a lot of effort on reliability and availability for example in some of our work on Windows NT 5.0," Price said. "We are reducing the number of situations where customers would need to reboot from the server -- for example, when you make a configuration change."

NT 5.0 Beta 2 On Its Way
In related news, Microsoft is paving the way for NT 5.0 Beta 2 with two highly targeted technical conferences in coming months.

Focusing on editors, reviewers, and analysts, Microsoft has announced an Aug. 18 and 19 workshop on NT Server 5.0 and NT Workstation 5.0 in Seattle.

The company will also host a Professional Developers Conference Oct. 12 to 15 in Denver, at which it is offering attendees an updated PDC version of NT 5.0 Beta 2.

Beta 2 of NT 5.0 is supposed to ship this summer. Final code is due sometime next year.