“As your small-to-midsize company grows, how can you make sure
your network of servers grows to fit? You’ve probably read horror
stories about companies that cannot cope. You’re probably already
experiencing network outages, delayed access to key files and
general problems with your setup….”
“Linux holds up very well against Windows NT in terms of
multiprocessor support. A VA Linux Systems four-processor box far
outperformed a similar multiprocessor box (same processor types and
speeds) in a SPEC rate integer benchmark test. (As is true
with all benchmarks, though, how well a system works on your
computing tasks forms the only real benchmark for your
organization.)”
“Along with adding processors to a system, you can combine
similar systems together into clusters to increase performance on
certain tasks. A Linux Beowulf cluster (http://www.beowulf.org)
from IBM, for example, tied the fastest record for the
POVray-tracing benchmark. The off-the-shelf $150,000 cluster of
Pentium II Xeons matched the performance of a $5.5 million Cray
supercomputer.”