Sun Passes Billion-Object Performance Test

August 4, 2000

NEWS BRIEFS

Palo Alto, CA — E-business companies now possess a new weapon in their fight against the spiraling demands of the dot-com age. Sun and Novell recently demonstrated a server performance benchmark that scaled to over one billion objects at the Novell BrainShare 2000 conference using Novell’s NDS eDirectory for Solaris running on a single Sun Enterprise 450 server.

These results demonstrate that a single Sun workgroup server can successfully scale to one billion objects, whereas competitive benchmarks of PC servers show that 10 or more Intel-based servers are required to support the same number of objects.

As dot-com companies ramp up to meet the rapidly growing Internet market, the ability to effectively and efficiently scale with fewer servers is key to survival in the Internet age. Fewer servers enable these businesses to centralize their data as well as their networking and systems management functions. This slashes costs on IT maintenance, eliminates inherent redundancies associated with multiple directories and removes unnecessary, expensive equipment.

“While other vendors equate server performance with the number of servers, Sun focuses on delivering the highest levels of scalability needed in today’s dot-com environments in one server,” said John Davis, director of workgroup server marketing at Sun. “Sun continues to raise the bar for products achieving the highest scalability and availability to handle unpredictable peak demands.”

To implement the billion-object benchmark, Novell’s eDirectory for Solaris was configured to a single Sun Enterprise 450 server powered by four UltraSPARC(TM) processors, running the robust Solaris(TM) Operating Environment and utilized 1.2 terabytes of storage. All one billion users were contained within one organizational container split into four partitions, each housing 250 million users.

The competition’s benchmark configuration demonstrated a different approach utilizing more servers to generate the same results. The solution utilized NetWare and Novell’s eDirectory attached to 10 PC servers equipped with four XEON 400Mhz processors, 3.5 GB of RAM and 180-200 GB of disk storage per server. Each server contained l00 million users.

“In our line of business, power and scalability are key components to our success,” said Joel Grant, chief technology officer, netPCS Networks, an eCommunications service provider delivering a total personal communications system (PCS) for Internet users conducting e-business. “That’s why we’ve chosen Sun’s Enterprise 450 server running Novell’s eDirectory for Solaris. The benchmark results give us peace of mind as our company continues to approach the billion object mark by the end of the year.”

In the rapidly growing Internet economy, the e-business model requires a directory technology that combines the reach of the Internet, the extranet and the enterprise. The model must also allow businesses the ability to establish relationships with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. To do this, companies require a centralized solution that can reliably store and retrieve information at high speeds, handle unexpected spikes in demand for directory-related services and can integrate and consolidate information from other directors within and outside the company.

By using Novell’s eDirectory as the central repository of customer information as well as network resource data coupled with the robust reliability, scalability and availability of the Sun Enterprise 450 server and demonstrated strength of the Solaris Operating Environment, customers can support content-rich sites, large volumes of data and the huge transaction loads that transpire over the Internet. By doing these functions on a single server, Sun makes it easier for companies to consolidate diverse directories along with the number and types of network resources. This enables companies to run their IT infrastructures more efficiently and effectively even when the systems grow at a staggering pace.

“The dot-com age impacts every aspect of business, so it’s not unusual in today’s business for a typical company directory to contain tens or hundreds of thousands of objects,” said Carl Ledbetter, senior vice president, business and corporate development at Novell. “With Novell’s eDirectory running on the Sun Enterprise 450 server, companies can streamline their operations and key business functions. EDirectory’s cross-platform capabilities make it possible for users to leverage information across the diverse platforms common in today’s heterogeneous corporate computing environments. EDirectory improves the end users’ business experience by facilitating the creation of e-commerce relationships with suppliers, customers and business allies across one Net.”

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision – The Network Is The Computer – has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. Sun can be found on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com .

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