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Utilization of Resources

John Kirch: “Since Microsoft sees NT as a viable alternative to all other network-capable operating systems on the market, UNIX and Novell included, one would assume that NT would come with all the tools necessary to accomplish the most basic tasks required: file and printer services. Any systems/network administrator knows from experience that there are two important issues to be considered when setting up a file server or adding a new network user: security, i.e. passwords and file permissions; and quotas for limiting disk usage of any new or existing users or groups. … More important than this issue, however, is that NT does not provide any mechanism for limiting a user’s disk usage! UNIX and Novell, on the other hand, provide software for performing this seemingly elementary control. Microsoft has announced, however, that its not yet released NT Server 5.0 will provide “new storage management features such as disk quotas…” (see their press release, Windows NT 5.0 Beta Delivered to Over 200,000 Developers).”^w22 —See John Kirch’s article “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX” at http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/, June 4, 1998, web page, for more information on NTFS flaws.

“The BATCH facility in OpenVMS allows jobs to run at specific times, and under specific user security constraints. As such it can safely be made available to non-privileged users. In a cluster it automatically will supply load balancing.” —John Malmberg^e85

hard drives

    “I;’ve harped on the hard drive bottleneck which is stuck at a rate that hovers around a meager 25 megabytes per second (or about 200 Mbps). That;’s about one-fifth the speed of a Gigabit Ethernet connection. And that;’s the speed you;’ll get if you are lucky. The next bottleneck comes from Microsoft Windows itself. Last I checked, the best speed achievable by the Windows NT kernel topped out at about 450 Mbps, making Gigabit Ethernet a waste of time for a small office. This amounts to a scene that just as easily can be served by 500-MHz processors running on the cheap memory you can buy at Costco.
    “RAID Can Save the Day Dept.: Last summer [2000] at Computex, Intel showed its BNU31—fashioned after the Ultra 160 specification—which the company called ;‘an affordable RAID controller for servers.;’ To Intel, affordable means $600. I suppose it was affordable compared with the $2,100 Mylex RAID controller from six months earlier [2000]. These controllers claim a 200-Mbps sustained data rate under optimal conditions, which of course are unlikely in the real world. But with eight drives, I suppose you get close to that.
    “Adaptec and others soon introduced sub-$500 controllers meeting the Ultra 160 specifications. Since then, HighPoint Technologies introduced its one-chip ATA/100 RAID controller for cheap IDE drives, which is now being bundled on motherboards to provide RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 1+0 support. This seem to be the cheapest way to enhance system performance. Large hard drives have become so cheap—$10 per gigabyte and falling—that buying multiple drives to improve perfomance makes some sense.” —John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, July 2001^m5

geek humor

“The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity — the rest is overhead for the operating system.” —Nicholas Ambrose

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