I've always been a big fan of superservers from NetFrame and Tricord, but after spending some time with a few them, my love affair is beginning to wane. And for those of you that are about to submit that monster purchase order to buy your first, you may want to reconsider your strategy, particularly if you want to run NetWare on these big beasts. Superservers cost more than the traditional PC on steriods, sometimes by a factor of five or so. But that's because they've got more guts, reliability, and performance. They have redundant everything, specialized software to manage them from afar, and high-reliability components that are far beyond what you can get at your average CompUSA. That's the theory. In practice, as I found out, you trade off all these niceities with having a sole supplier for much of your server components. And having a relatively closed PC server platform can be a problem: If you don't like the neighborhood, it may be a pain to move across the tracks to the open side of town. I visited three separate NetFrame sites over the last few months: a large bank in Chicago, Connecticut Blue Cross/Blue Shield outside of New Haven, and the American Red Cross outside of Washington, DC. All three are dissatisfied for a different reason with their purchase, and while none of them have dumped their NetFrames, they are seriously thinking about buying something else to augment them. The bank I visited is the treasury and capital markets department of a large Dutch holding company called ABN-AMRO Bank that owns many banks around the world. They have owned three NetFrames for four years and run a 250 user version of NetWare 3.12 on it. You'll be hearing more about my adventures with them in a future series of columns. The bank likes the NetFrames for a big reason: they are able to support more users with less staff, a big consideration in these days where minimal overhead matters. However, the bank is running out of disk space, and wants to either purchase additional magnetic or new optical storage for their server. Magnetic storage is pricey, since they have to pay what amounts to a tax to NetFrame for their drives. Those of us that purchase SCSI disks on the open market pay around 75 cents or less a megabyte for large disks these days, but with NetFrame it costs $2.50 per megabyte. "It is astronomical," says David Price, a systems officer with the bank. Optical is more expensive, and difficult to manage. But big disk prices aren't the only proprietary problems faced by superserver owners. How about network adapters? Blue Cross has owned four NetFrames for three years, and mostly they run a 250 user versions of NetWare 3.11. They are a token ring shop and have not been happy with the performance of the token ring cards on their NetFrames, which of course are proprietary. They run the Microsoft office suites and some client-server applications, nothing too fancy. They did some benchmark tests using a variety of token ring cards from IBM, Compaq and Madge and IBM Ethernet cards in IBM and Compaq servers, and found performance gains of 25 percent or more, depending on how you measure the throughput. When Mark Lille, manager of network services for Blue Cross called NetFrame on this issue, they admitted that their token ring cards and drivers were older technology and that new token ring >cards were still about six months away from shipping at best. That got Lille steamed, and you'll hear him and I talk about this issue at a panel on selecting the right NetWare server (along with representatives from Tricord and Zenith) that we are doing at the Networld+Interop show in Vegas on Thursday March 30th. Lille is not thrilled about the UPS connector the NetFrame has as well, and wishes that he could pick and choose his UPS vendor, which of course would cost less than the UPS parts he has to buy from NetFrame. "It is nice to have all that redundancy, but if you have problem, unless you have people with superior training, you can't bring it back as quickly as with a ordinary server. Because our NetFrames don't have consoles, they are more difficult to manage," he says. But hardware isn't the only issue. We've also got software to deal with, specifically the network operating systems software. The Red Cross has two NetFrame 450FTs running 500 and 1000 user versions of NetWare 4.02. David Willis, the network manager at the relief agency, is literally seeing red: "It isn't really NetFrame's fault, but Novell's: when our server gets busy, the built-in compression scheme actually locks out users. Novell is working on a fix, but in the meantime we're using more disk space than we really need." "All the hardware redundancy in the world won't help you when your network OS rolls over and dies," says ABN's Price. This means that Novell has to be more proactive about finding and solving issues with large numbers of connections and other high-performance environments. So far, according to these customers, NetFrame has taken more of the initiative than Novell. "NetFrame has been very reasonable in sending people on site to troubleshoot Novell problems, and Novell has subsequently released patches that we identified. I don't think we would have gotten the same attention from Compaq or any of the other first-tier server providers," says Price. Now, reading this column you may think I have it in for NetFrame: far from it. I do think overall the company makes solid products, and while pricey, they are probably the most reliable servers you can buy. But consider carefully the implications of getting proprietary servers -- you may, as these three organizations did, regret the decision down the road.
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David Strom
Port Washington, NY 11050 USA
US TEL: 1 (516) 944-3407