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July 20, 1998

The Hidden Cost Of NT

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A planned enhancement in NT's directory structure should ease administration chores. NT 5.0 will come with Active Directory, a distributed directory that will keep track of everything from users, files, and applications to servers, object links between applications, and the paths that transactions take.

The next release of NT will also handle users' systems configurations and their addresses, as well as security privileges.

Despite the performance problems some users have experienced with NT, it's tough to argue with the success Microsoft has experienced with NT sales. That success is attributable to NT's price/performance.

A study by the Aberdeen Group in May performed benchmark tests comparing various Unix hardware-software systems against various configurations of NT Server running SAP R/3. The benchmarks indicated that NT-on-Intel price/performance is three to eight times better than the price/performance of any Unix systems. The best Unix price in the study, $1,918 per user for a Sun Microsystems E10000 server, compared with prices of between $516 and $680 per user for comparable NT servers from Compaq, Data General, and HP.

Robert Dorin, the Aberdeen Group senior analyst who commissioned the tests, cautions that NT won't handle extremely high volumes of R/3 users. "But NT is a lot cheaper than Unix and performs well up to 1,600 users," says Dorin.

Companies that fail to heed these limitations will suffer the consequences. These problems crop up when business units, rather than the IT department, purchase NT systems. "When the application and server become so large that the department can't handle it anymore, they throw it over the wall to the data center," says Joe Cote, Amdahl's director of customer service.

Dick Sullivan, VP of NT solutions for IBM's server business unit, concurs. Many times, business units don't consider the long-term maintenance and scalability issues, Sullivan says. "To these users, it's all about getting the applications running quickly," he says.

Downtime Costs
The cost of downtime, in qualitative measures such as customer service or quantitative measures such as missed orders, is becoming a crucial issue to even the smallest companies as they move into the world of E-business. Users can add servers as applications grow and transactions become critical, but that doesn't address availability and systems-management issues, says Sullivan. "Even the small organization can't tolerate a 97% availability rate for E-business," he adds.

Despite these near-term stumbling blocks, most industry observers expect NT Server to continue to win IT converts because of its attractive price/performance. Ultimately, Microsoft and its third-party partners will hone the performance and reliability of Windows NT. But until NT is as mature and robust as Unix and host systems, the message that IT administrators should heed is this: Use NT Server where it's most appropriate, and don't require it to do the job of high-end transaction systems.