Anadarko Petroleum Corporation is an Oil and Gas Exploration company. Our environment consists of approximately 70 UNIX and NT Servers and approximately 1500 PC's running NT on the desktops. We have a WAN with three T1 lines from Houston to London, Liberal and Midland. Our Network Operating System is NT running mostly on COMPAQ 5000's. More information on the company can be found on our Web Page, www.anadarko.com.

I am researching moving our UNIX/SYBASE databases to NT/SQL Server. To date, we have used NT for the desktop, for the Network Operating System, and file, application and print servers, but never for any enterprise database servers. My UNIX database servers house mission critical databases. Our user community is used to having 99% availability on HP UNIX and Sybase systems. I am concerned about the information I have gathered so far indicating that NT's scalability has improved, but has compromised availability. I am hearing that if you go beyond three processors with a SQL Server database you will experience process lockups and that machine reboots are quite common and in-flight transactions are lost. I am at the point where I believe that in order to provide the service levels I am required to provide, I will have to buy redundant NT servers and attempt to do SQL Server replication between the two servers.

I am also interested in any research that has been done to size an NT system to replace an existing UNIX system. The NT SQL Server benchmarks I have seen are done on systems with 3 GB of memory. The UNIX systems I am using run large databases (30 GB data) with 50 simultaneous users with 256 MB of memory just fine. What is it about NT that requires so much more memory or is this a false conclusion? I will be moving a Sybase database running on UNIX on an HP K200 with 2 RISC processors and 256 MB of memory to a SQL Server database running on NT on a COMPAQ proliant 6000 with 3 pentium Pro 200 / 512K processors and 1 GB of memory. Do they equate? If performance is a problem with this system, it appears from published benchmark numbers, that I would be better off adding 2 GB of memory as opposed to adding 1 more processor. True? The "Just How Far Can It Scale Up" keynote address will be invaluable to the research I am doing for my company as well as the "Measuring Windows NT - Possibilities and Limitations" and "Porting UNIX to Windows NT" Refereed Paper Sessions. If these were the only three sessions that you could fit me into, it would be well worth the trip for me. However, the entire workshop and the opportunity to discuss my issues/concerns with the researchers and others who have been there already will be of great value to me.

I am also interested in tools that are availabe/preferred for stress testing an NT SQL Server Application. Before I can deploy a mission critical application, I must know that it will not die when the 50^th user attempts to run a query. I am used to using HP's GlancePlus product as well as SAR reports to look at system performance and determine if I am I/O bound, or processor or memory poor. What tools are available/preferred for analyzing performance problems and for monitoring the NT/SQL Server systems?

Kris Cutaia
Manager, Systems and Operations
Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
17001 Northchase Drive
Houston, Texas 77060

kris_cutaia@anadarko.com
(281) 876-864