Microsoft launched on Wednesday the Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system, accompanied by support from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Veritas Software.
New Microsoft Storage OS Attracts Backers
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Eugenia Loli
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I sure hope they’ve performed some minor miracles for NTFS disk I/O performance. I’ve recently been looking at some of the high end IBM server/storage hardware, and the performance stats compared to Unix was borrible. Some server+RAID cards were rated at ~500Mb/sec under unix, and ~250Mb/sec for NTFS/Windows. Nice to know we’re losing 50% of disk I/O on NTFS. I sure wouldn’t buy their storage product with those numbers.
We just ran into some very oddball NTFS problems involving applications accessing files when there are too many very large files on a server drive. Excel and Access were giving us “drive disconnected” errors and the apps were ‘losing’ their current file and could not be saved by the user anymore (at random intervals).
Scary shit. I am now convinced that NTFS needs more work to become truly industrial strength – unless they have already done this with Windows 2003 (we are still on Windows 2000 here) which is what this new NAS OS is based on.
NT- No, Thanks
Since when is taking Windows 2k(+) Server and renaming it creating a “new” operating system?
The machine I am talking about is an 8-way Win2K box serving 600 concurrent users with a 322 GB RAID drive that is about 90% full. Could Samba handle that load? I doubt it highly.
I use samba, on a 1-way slackware box serving 2 concurrent users (me and me) with a 540 GB encrypted RAID and a couple hundred gigs of temp space, 90% full. Samba handles this load just fine.
2 users != 600 users you dummy.
Meanwhile, a Russian hacker is digging through your data on the Microsoft Storage system and publishing your customer’s credit card information.
Yeah, I think Samba would handle that ‘load’ just fine.
You really got fleeced my Microsoft good, didn’t you?
I must be too tired. I’ve spent all the night working. When I read the news, I thought it was about Windows Sewage Server 2003 🙂
Time to go to bed.
#1, what filesystem and unix version were you using? Frankly it would be an absolute disgrace if unix with a journaling fs could outperform ntfs by those quantities. Also how did you test it?
I have a mess of clients on Windows servers/networks. Would I have at least as good reliability and security with SAMBA on BSD/Linux as I do with Windows NT/2000? One of the above postings is now making me wonder. (I haven’t implemented it, yet.) Is Samba as robust as Windows servers?
Thanks.
Yeah, I’ll tell our admin’s here that some anonymous – “bwaha” script kiddie thinks that Samba should handle the load ‘just fine’. That should impress them.
Maybe they will actually be pretty damn impressed when they find out its true.
Because “anonymous” says so.
I don’t care if you keep using your NT system, but youre the one complaining about its poor performance w/regard to ‘drive disconnected’ errors etc.
Somebody suggested that Samba would probably handle 600 users and 500GB just fine, and you can’t refute this because you quite clearly don’t have a clue what Samba is or isn’t capable of. You just refuse to believe it because you think for some inexplicable reason it ‘can’t be true’.
Thats OK, stay with your broken system, live with your ‘drive disconnected’ errors, complain NTFS isn’t ‘industrial strength’, and don’t evaluate the alternatives because you were told about them by a ‘script kiddie’ instead of an expensive IT contractor.
I guess it’ll make you feel better when you have paid someone a large sum of money to tell you what an anonymous script kiddie can tell you for free.
So far no one has answered the question that has been posted twice by two different people on this thread with any proof whatsoever. Does Samba cut it for large enterprise installations?
Anonymous teenage Linux zealots saying yea or nea with absolutely nothing to back them up just doesn’t cut it around here, I’m afraid.
Honestly, besides hearing some rumours about samba, i wouldn’t know the first thing about it. But even though, the rule counts that you should at least first try something out before rejecting it…
Besides that, if i needed to support that number of users, with that amount of data to be served, i guess i would have
turned to clustering some time, by now…
BeOS can do that on a bad day!
This is from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ch01_07.html
Note that this info dates from 1999 and the introduction of Samba 2.0 so I’m positive that those numbers have improved a great deal since then
1.7.3 Performance
There are major performance and scalability increases in Samba: the code has been reorganized and nmbd (the Samba name service daemon) heavily rewritten:
*
Name/browsing service now supports approximately 35,000 simultaneous clients.
*
File and print services support 500 concurrent users from a single medium-sized server without noticeable performance degradation.
*
Linux/Samba on identical hardware now consistently performs better than NT Server. And best of all, Samba is improving.
*
Improved “opportunistic” locking allows client machines to cache entire files locally, greatly improving speed without running the risk of accidentally overwriting the cached files.