Two Commodity Scaleable Servers: A Billion Transactions Per Day and the Terra-Server

This paper describes two large scaleable servers built using Windows NT® Server and Microsoft® SQL Server™ running on commodity hardware. One server processes more than a billion transactions per day — more transactions per day than any enterprise in the world. It demonstrates a 45-node cluster running a three-tier DCOM-based SQL application. Another application, called Terra-Server, stores one terabyte of images in a Microsoft SQL Server Database on a single node. Terra-Server manages a database of aerial images. It is the world’s largest atlas, and soon it will be on the Internet. It will use Microsoft Site server to sell the right to use the imagery. Terra-Server is a classic scaleup story. Other Windows NT scalability projects are also mentioned: a large Microsoft Exchange mail server, a hundred-million hits per day web server, a 64-bit addressing SQL server, and cluster fault-tolerance.