ICL Plc says it has bid one of the largest centralized systems built to run Microsoft Exchange, to an unidentified UK customer which tendered a contract for more than 50,000 seats of the groupware. ICL has configured eight diskless Trimetra XtraServers – which are re-badged Unisys Corp Aquantas – on a local area network attached to central EMC Corp disks and Storagetek tape storage systems. ICL says the configuration effectively overcomes NT’s vertical-scaling limitations by centralizing all the data, services and management. To configure large NT systems, multiple servers, each with relatively few processors, are connected into what are effectively NT server farms. NT’s horizontal-oriented scaling stands juxtaposed to Unix’s vertical scaling capabilities, where each server can be fitted with many CPUs.
