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From: louie@cellar.bae.bellcore.com (Paul Louie)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Novell Portable Netware on RISC Platforms?
Message-ID: <28455@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 1 Nov 90 18:28:01 GMT
Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com
Reply-To: louie@cellar.bae.bellcore.com (Paul Louie)
Organization: Bell Communications Research
Lines: 29

In article <134@frcs.UUCP> paul@frcs.UUCP (Paul Nash) writes:
>We would like to know what RISC-based Unix platforms have Netware available
>(now or early 1991), and what their performance is like.  The easiest way
>(for me) to measure performance is to compare to a 25/33 MHz 386 Netware
>server (faster, slower, much faster, much slower).  We would like to know
>whether a medium-sized Unix box (say a MIPS 3000 or 6000) could do useful
>work _and_ be a Novell server with reasonable performance for LAN clients.
> [stuff deleted]

I recently have an opportunity to work at a client's site where there
are Netware 2.15 SFT installed running in a HP RS-20 (386/20) and Portable
Netware running in a DEC machine.  Now although the scenerio is not ideal
for Mr. Nash's question it does give some light on the performance of
different Netware platform.

The NW 2.15 is necessary, because there are MACs on the LAN.  I never told
why Portable NW being there.  Now, the PC based NW have 84 users and the 
DEC have only 31.  Doing things like VT-100 emulation shows that response
time from 2.15 is about 0.5-1.5 sec and 2-5 sec for the Portable.  Both
LANs access the same host(DEC).

So, in my opinion, with Netware 386 being available a PC fileserver can
beat any Portable configuration, RISC or not.  I believe the reason for
this is that on the PC, NW was designed and tune for the hardware.  And
in the Portable environment it has to run as an application and so many
low level activities are out of its control.


Paul