Compaq ProLiant 1000 Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture - The New Open Standa - Page 6

Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture - The New Open Standard for Distributed Messaging Within a Cluster 6 which provides the interface between the application and the VI enabled NICs. It also supports and issues send/receive and read/write commands through the VI NICs as well. Customer Benefits Utilizing VI Architecture Customers using VI Architecture are assured of an open architecture promoting clustered computing and improving communication. Customer benefits include the following: • Lower cost per transaction. The VI Architecture user will benefit in the reduced cost of transactions and application systems which will be achieved when VI becomes a broad industry standard. Vendors from Compaq, Tandem, IBM, Oracle, and Giganet are all producing hardware and software products that take advantage of the VI Architecture. With VI Architecture on existing servers and storage, customers will not have the need to increase server capacity as they have had to in the past, thus reducing cost. Also, with customers using traditional network interfaces for application corrections, applications will operate more efficiently in their use of buffer pools and networks, so overall communication costs will also be reduced. • Scalability. Software vendors will be able to offer their applications without change to take advantage of VI Architecture as Microsoft integrates the function in their Winsock 2 interface, which is a direction they have stated. This results in immediate scalability for Winsock 2-enabled applications when VI Architecture suitable hardware is used in the systems interconnect. Thus, increased performance for existing servers and immediate cost benefit for the customer is provided. Advantages of VI Applications VI Architecture, as an emerging industry standard protocol for Distributed Message Passing and command processing, provides many technical advantages including: High Degree of Application and High Availability Applications can take advantage of the Distributed Messaging and Parallel processing of VI with very simple read/write and send/receive commands through a well understood transport layer like Winsock 2 for NT servers and workstations. These are also being extended for SCO UnixWare and Novell NetWare as well. This architecture can provide a high degree of application and data availability as well as increased application performance through high-speed systems interfaces at a read/write level for query and/or transaction processing in a Client/Server model. It can also enhance performance as parallel instances of the application run on two or more clustered nodes. Scaling can be even further enhanced by partitioning the application(s) into more efficient subprograms executing on different clustered nodes and passing dynamic information only as required to complete the transaction(s). In simple test cases for message passing, dramatic results have been achieved over traditional TCP/IP and LAN media. In a database test case using IBM's UDBV5.0 with Extended Enterprise Edition for NT, it was observed that nearly linear scaling could be achieved in DSS operations across six ProLiant 6500 servers each supporting 70+GB of disk. This technology was voted Best of Show for Servers at the Hannover Technology Fair, April 1998. ECG098/0998