Sequent and Open Market announce World's Fastest Web Server; Symmetry 5000 system running Open Market WebServer achieves record-setting performance of 7,200 WebStones and 5,000 simultaneous connections

Business Wire, Dec 14, 1995

BEAVERTON, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 14, 1995--Sequent Computer Systems Inc. and Open Market Inc. today announced record-setting World Wide Web (WWW) server performance on a Symmetry(R) 5000 series running Open Market WebServer(R) software.

Sequent(R) and Open Market(R) achieved 7,200 industry-standard WebStones and beat all previous records for the number of simultaneous connections by achieving 5,000 simultaneous 14.4Kb modem connections. The WebStone performance was three times the previous high-water mark of 2,400 WebStones and five times the number of simultaneous connections.

The collaborative effort between Sequent, manufacturer of the world's most scaleable symmetric multiprocessing systems tuned for the Internet, and Open Market, maker of high-performance business software products for the Internet, signaled the launch of a joint marketing program to deliver the benefits of their combined technology to large organizations.

Emerging Market for High-End Web Servers

"As online markets mature, more and more large firms are turning to Web-based infrastructure for their internal knowledge management and collaborative work applications," said Mike Demshki, head of Sequent's business communications group. "The days of smallish Web servers running on workstations are drawing to a close for most serious business applications on the Web.

"Whether you're talking about putting significant multimedia content on the Internet, or doing demand or supply chain management with trading partners, or using the Web for corporate-wide document management and collaborative work, you're talking about large, mission-critical applications that have the same performance, scalability and availability profiles as core online transaction processing and decision support applications.

"With this benchmark, we've demonstrated that Sequent and Open Market can deliver the kind of performance organizations need for large, mission-critical, web-based applications."

"The Web is transitioning from purely communication and promotion purposes to intensive transaction-based critical business applications," said Pierre Bouchard, vice president of Open Market server products. "As that happens, companies are realizing that they need the most reliable, secure, and scaleable high-performance systems available. Only Open Market's WebServer software is designed for the highest level of performance on UNIX systems such as the Sequent Symmetry 5000; our WebStones benchmark illustrates the excellent performance that can be achieved today."

In addition to leading-edge performance and scalability, availability is a key concern for enterprises that depend on Web technology for online business-to-business, business-to-consumer or internal communications. Through Sequent's advanced open systems clustering technology, Symmetry Web servers running Open Market software can deliver high availability to meet the demanding requirements of doing business on the Internet.

The Benchmark

The two systems used in the world-beating WebStone benchmark were Symmetry 5000 SE30 Servers, each with 6 100 MHz Pentium processors, 256Mb RAM, and four Ethernets. One server was used to generate the client load and the other server hosted the Open Market WebServer.

The benchmark client emulated 14.4Kb modem users. This class of user places the greatest burden on the server by requiring that the server buffer data due to the slowness of the connection. In addition, many of the applications requiring high-capacity, high-throughput Web servers are associated with the public Internet, where the average link speed is lower than in firm Intranets, or are associated with mobile workers in a firm whose connections to corporate resources is much slower than typical LAN speed.

According to Michael Edelman, manager of WWW technologies at Sequent, the benchmarks were run on modestly configured Symmetry 5000 Server hardware platforms. "Using more robust hardware configurations, 10,000 WebStones and tens of thousands of simultaneous connections on one platform are within easy reach," Edelman said.

A detailed white paper on the benchmark will be available from both Sequent Online (http://www.sequent.com) and the Open Market web site (http://www.openmarket.com) in December.

Sequent Symmetry 5000 Series

The Symmetry 5000 Series is Sequent's full range of UNIX(R)-based SMP computers for business critical applications. Used in applications ranging from Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) to high-performance Web and messaging servers, these systems provide a scaleable growth path for large enterprise and service provider Internet and Intranet solutions.

Symmetry 5000 systems support up to 30 100mhz Intel Pentium processors, with 3.5GB main memory and 3.5 TB disk storage and run Sequent's DYNIX/ptx operating system -- proven, business hardened technology. Up to four Symmetry 5000 systems can be clustered together for increased capacity and high availability.

Open Market WebServer and Secure WebServer