IPCS Outperforms Stand-Alone NT
While the AS/400 Integrated PC Server (IPCS) has already seen considerable success in the area of server consolidation, one recent study indicates the IPCS actually outperforms stand-alone Microsoft Windows NT servers in the areas of file serving, print serving and tape backup, according to IBM.
Using NetBench 5.01, developed by Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation (ZDBO), file-serving performances were compared between NT on the IPCS and NT running on a non-IBM stand-alone PC server. The results indicate a greater throughput capacity on the IPCS as the number of PC users increases and creates a higher workload.
Using its ServerBench measurement, ZDBO discovered NT on the IPCS delivers a slightly better throughput than stand-alone NT. The IPCS’s higher throughput was consistently better than stand-alone NT, regardless of the number of PC clients. ServerBench is an application serving performance test that produces three different types of loads on the server -- processor, disk and network intensive.
For the tape backup comparison, ZDBO studied the performance of the AS/400 SAV command and the Windows NT Backup program (Ntbackup.exe). When using AS/400 SAV, the NT IPCS shares DASD with the AS/400, and any NT drives appear as objects to the AS/400.
ZDBO reports the following results: on the IBM 3590 high performance (half-inch) tape subsystem, AS/400 SAV achieved 32 GB/hr while NT Backup achieved 4 GB/hr; on the 3570 Tape Cassette Subsystem, AS/400 SAV achieved 11 GB/hr while NT Backup achieved 4 GB/hr.
ZDBO also reports that AS/400 SAV outperformed NT Backup on the IBM 6385 13G quarter-inch Cartridge Tape Unit (CTU) 7.5 GB/hr to 3 GB/hr, respectively. Performance on both the IBM 6380 2.5 GB quarter-inch CTU and 6390 7 GB 8 mm CTU was the same for both AS/400 SAV and NT Backup.