brinkema@fjc.GOV (John R. Brinkema) (05/12/91)
In various advertising for Novell Products, claims are made that the the Novell server can support (say) '128' or '256' users*. What are these users supposed to be doing ... or are they just connected. We have seen situtions that a server had difficulty supporting 3 or 4 users ... but those users are (for all practical purposes) doing massive file transfers to/from 386s. I recognize that such a user is clearly unfair as a standard; but a user that is merely 'on the network' doing nothing is also unfair. Technically: what is workload definition for a standard Novell user? tnx. jb. * I am assuming that If one were to get a Novell server licensed for 128 users, then *some* platform can deliver the required power.
sanders@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Terry P Sanderson) (05/13/91)
In article <409@fjcp60.GOV> brinkema@fjc.GOV (John R. Brinkema) writes: >In various advertising for Novell Products, claims are made that the >the Novell server can support (say) '128' or '256' users*. What are these users >supposed to be doing ... or are they just connected. We have seen situtions >that a server had difficulty supporting 3 or 4 users ... but those users >are (for all practical purposes) doing massive file transfers to/from >386s. I recognize that such a user is clearly unfair as a standard; but a >user that is merely 'on the network' doing nothing is also unfair. > >Technically: what is workload definition for a standard Novell user? tnx. jb. > >* I am assuming that If one were to get a Novell server licensed for 128 >users, then *some* platform can deliver the required power. John, Novell defines a "user" as someone logged into the NetWare file server. If you are talking about a gateway product, it it defined as a connection thru the gateway. A "user" has access to all NetWare facilities such as print services, file services, and any gateway services that might be on the network. Novell cannot determine the "average" use for a connection to the server, so they simply define it as a login. Obviously, if you get 250 user Netware 3.11 and attempt to run it on a 386SX, don't expect to get any kind of performance if you get 250 users logged in, each of them doing ad-hoc queries on a non-indexed dBASE database. However, as in our case, a 25MHz IBM Model 80-A31 running NetWare 2.2 with about 25 possible users (about half of them Mac's) running WordPerfect, dBASE, Pegasus Mail, Windows, etc., barely gets the server excited. Also, the perceived performance to the user depends on the bandwidth of the network, and many other more subtle parameters such as disk speed, server bus bandwidth, etc. Hope this helps. Terry Sanderson Supervisor, Microcomputer Specialists University of Toronto Computing Services sanders@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca