Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!uunet!xstor!billbr
From: billbr@xstor.com (Bill Brothers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: NFS Support in NetWare
Message-ID: <1991Mar01.050450.17708@xstor.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 05:04:50 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com> <6614@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>
Organization: Storage Dimensions, Inc.
Lines: 34

In article <6614@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) writes:
>In article <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com> keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes:
]
]While I am willing to suspend my disbelief (until I try it) that a
]Netware NFS server might be superior to a UNIX NFS server, a lot of what
]you say is a red herring.
]
]
]I mean, many of your arguments for the superiority of Novell over UNIX strike
]me as more marketspeak than tech speak.  We might as well claim that a UNIX
]NFS server is superior to a Novell server because it doesn't have the
]"additional baggage" of dealing with DOS and Mac files.  Which might sound
>good but the statement is pretty content-free.
>
I can appreciate your position Steve, but pure benchmarking of systems
provides some pretty amazing results. We see up to 3.5 Mbytes/second
come out of a Novell subsystem. (Granted the wire slows it to a
crawl...) On the UNIX side, we have been able to attain 1.15 Mbytes/sec
through the filesystem. The main reason is that nearly every UNIX
on the market insists on building systems for the least common 
denominator. I.e. they are supporting the dumb ST-506 style of
disk interface. Novell has seen fit to provide high-level constructs
for driver writers. This allows us to build requests to the disk
as large as 3-4 Megabytes. Meanwhile UNIX is stuck in the 1-8k
request range. One only needs to look at the performance curves of
drives to see that highest throughputs are attained at requests of
greater than 64K. I don't particularly like the way things are. I 
much prefer UNIX to Novell. However, If you are going to pick on
Novell, you should attack the namespace problem and other serious drawbacks.
The performance issue is fairly black and white. :-(

Bill Brothers
Storage Dimensions, Inc.
billbr@xstor.COM