On May 20 Microsoft Corp plans to prove the Windows NT really is suitable for higher-end systems, by announcing Scalability Day, at New York’s Equitable Building, hears our sister newsletter CliENT Server News. The company plans to unveil a raft of new scalability-related software and technology, at least some of it still in early development. Microsoft is also expected to announce plans to create an Enterprise NT Server, starting with NT 5.0. Redmond has been mulling over exactly what will be in Enterprise Server, an unplanned NT packaging variant that corporate users have been asking for. So far it’s said to have decided that its Wolfpack clustering, Viper transaction server and SQL Server software will be included. The price will be somewhat higher than the standard NT Server. Scalability Day should also see notice of Microsoft’s supposed to launch a support program for NT symmetrical multiprocessing users, particularly those buying the first rash of eight-way boxes coming onto the market. We’re going to try to convince people that eight is a good and feasible solution, said SQL Server product manager John Nordlinger. Efforts are said to be underway to add scalability enhancements to all the programs in the BackOffice suite, particularly NT Server, SQL Server and Transaction Server. A key item under development is a major revision of NT’s memory addressing scheme, now the biggest bottleneck to scaling according to Nordlinger. NT’s current memory address limit is 4GB, but only 2GB can be used for applications, the rest goes to the operating system. The NT Server team is trying to re-architect the memory scheme so NT and its related services only commandeer 1GB, leaving 3Gb for applications. That could, at least theoretically, mean an instant 50% boost in NT database performance.
