The Hewlett Packard Server based on an Intel 333 mhz pentium running LINUX has claimed the spot as DMAC's fastest in house server. We found this while porting Unibase by DMAC release 7.45i to LINUX.

Previously, the Tandem server (Silicon Graphics) at three minutes for the mtest series was fastest. This summer the SUN Solaris server came close to the Tandem server at three minutes seventeen seconds.

Now in September, the HP server roars in using the LINUX operating system at one minute 46 seconds.

WOW! When this is compared to the 36 minutes time of the NT server / NT workstation at 200 mhz, you can see why some people are giving LINUX a serious look.

LINUX is free (except for packaging and shipping of about $50 from Redhat). The client tells us the HP server hardware cost about $2500. This is real value.

Gary says the support from HP on the server was great also. I found the GNU C/C++ compiler trouble free during the port. Everything works; the client is happy. The client used dumb terminals; not even PC emulation.

This type of system is lowering the investment without lowering the value for data entry clients. It has impressed us at DMAC greatly.

Above a certain number of users we do not know how well LINUX will do. The current release of LINUX does not support multiple CPUs (as does UNIX) so there easily is a top number of workstations (about 16-32) for now. When LINUX has multiple CPU processor support, it will be a real threat to slower operating systems and poor price performance.