Hewlett-Packard prevails where Microsoft fails
Hewlett-Packard prevails where Microsoft fails
By ARTHUR GASCH
Healthcare InfoTech Contributing Editor
One of the serious limitations to using Microsoft Windows NT Server for mission-critical applications, such as large Internet servers or medical applications, is that it isn’t all that reliable, being prone to frequent reboots and difficult to back up in real time. Nonetheless, large partners like IBM (Armonk, NY) and Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA) have been trying to fix in Windows NT what Microsoft (Redmond, WA) itself apparently was either unable or unwilling to fix. Now HP, in a partnership with Marathon Technologies (Box borough, MA), has announced that the problems of NT reliability are solved at least on the HP NetServer product.
NetServer takes the standard version of NT server and adds some seemingly magic software that makes the operating system fault-tolerant, allowing mission-critical applications to continue through component failures, hot swaps and blue screens. It uses Marathon’s "No Touch Recovery" components that HP has integrated into its own NT server, providing it with disaster tolerance and nonstop processing capabilities. The HP NetServer is an array that is capable, without human intervention, of handling these common types of Windows crashes transparently to end-users. This approach allows users to add on standard HP NetServer components and HP mission-critical services, as well as off-the-shelf Windows NT and shrink-wrapped applications software, thereby obtaining a highly flexible and expandable system. The combined HP-Marathon solution raises the level of robustness and availability of Windows NT Server, as well as providing customers with a scalable spectrum of technology that allows customers to choose the appropriate level of availability for their needs.
What does Microsoft think of this new method of making NT more robust and scalable? The folks in Redmond think it’s wonderful, because it may help overcome the market’s growing reluctance to trust Microsoft server solutions for mission-critical applications. This solution isn’t foolproof a poorly conceived service pack with memory leaks can still blow even the HP-Marathon solution out of the water. However, presumably customers using the HP server will look to HP for service updates, and HP will catch such problems before implementing them.
Assuming the HP solution works as described, it will increase business productivity and provide an added degree of protection of critical data from catastrophic loss or corruption. It also will lower the cost of operation by promoting a centralized system management, thereby reducing the total cost of system ownership. It also may be helpful to WinFrame and Citrix developers, providing increased confidence that the NT Server platform is stable and less subject to failure that brings down with it all WinFrame and Citrix applications that are being served.
HP and Marathon Technologies have struck a multi-year, multi-product, worldwide OEM service and support agreement, as well as creating a basis for HP and Marathon to work together on the next-generation HP NetServer Assured Availability solutions. The HP NetServer Assured Availability solution is scheduled to be available in July. Medical software vendors wishing to have their applications run on the most reliable NT hardware platform should look into adopting this platform, or advise their customers of its availability.
Another Microsoft Windows NT problem that has arisen is with its Service Pack 5 (SP5), supposedly a Y2K "fix" of problems that were found in Service Pack 4. It turns out that there are serious memory leak problems with SP5’s RPC Service routine. RPC stands for remote procedure calls, and its services are used by DCOM to run applications on another machine on the network. The service routine does not give back all the memory it allocates (e.g., it "leaks"), and if there are many DCOM calls, that can crash NT4. Another, less serious, memory leak also exists in the RAS (Remote Access Services) sector of NT4. The telecom manager for Windows NT, RAS is used by modems to access data over telephone lines. When it asserts new names to its list of names, it also leaks memory. While also a problem, it probably won’t crash an entire system.
Because of the serious nature of these problems, Microsoft will issue SP6 as soon as they are fixed and tested.
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