IBM slates NT scalability claims

Big Blue has issued a statement decrying Microsoft's claims regarding scalability, saying that they do not reflect the real world. A Web site has also been set up to reflect its claims.

"With off-the-shelf [software], it took us just a few weeks to assemble a system to run a billion simple transactions in a networked NT environment... However, this scenario doesn't come close to simulating what happens in a real enterprise environment. Simple read/write transactions are a far cry from querying multiple, heterogeneous databases databases and other complex transactions that are often part of the IT environments of the world's largest corporations ... There is a reason customers are not deploying PC servers or Windows NT in this type of environment."

IBM also claims that Microsoft's concentration on transaction benchmarks is misleading as it ignores issues such as integrating new technologies, robustness and network management. "Microsoft is referring to just the easiest of the many issues involved in enterprise computing... The Internet is changing the nature of transactions -- it will render obsolete today's definition of scalability," IBM claims.