windows stable enough for production interface server?

[Nancy McDaniel]

We are using 5.3 (no rev) on Windows 2000 and have had some issues over the last couple of months that have us questioning whether we want to continue running our interfaces on Windows.  We do not have lots of daily transactions but are growing our number of threads and the types of processing we want to do on this server as our company grows.

1.  What types of issues are other users experiencing with Windows 2000 running interfaces?

2.  Are other users having more reliabiilty on Windows 2003?

3.  I have heard that some companies have switched to Linux – what was the reasoning and has it been more stable?

I appreciate any input on this.  We have been on windows for some time now but only have recently have greatly increased the number of threads and complexity.  We are wanting to plan for future growth.

thanks,

Nancy

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Nancy,

We run on AIX and have never regretted it. There has been interest in Linux expressed but that is always cost based. Never has anyone even attempted to indicate it was more reliable.

Since we have a very reliable and usable environment with AIX and since the importance of the Integration Engine within the institution is high, moving to another platform just because it is cheaper does not seem to be attractive.

From a personal point of view, I would be very reluctant to utilize a Windows environment for Production.

I am also always leery of ‘public domain’ anything – just me I guess.

Jim Kosloskey

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Chris Brossette]

Hi Nancy,

Like Jim, we are on AIX and feel it is a very good environment for production.  We have a vendor supported Windows Cloverleaf system in-house and occasionally have problems with it.  It does not have that many interfaces – ADT, charges and scheduling – with a live a live and test environment.  Windows, in my honest opinion, is not the best platform for a large production environment.

I can not speak for Linux but it has a strong growing fan club in the Cloverleaf world and outside, and might be an option as long as you had a person that would handle the administration (same for AIX) of the server.

Good luck in your reviews and if you have any questions, please let me know.

Chris Brossette

Team Leader/DB & Integration

MS Baptist Health Systems

Jackson, MS

601.968.1396

cbrossette@mbhs.org

[Dennis Pfeifer]

I can not speak to windows, but I will address your question on Linux.

I have been running on Linux since 2000, and have been relatively happy.

My main (only) reason for switching from AIX to Linux was cost. Our AIX system was stable, and our Linux box is stable as well.

(We do have a minor semaphore problem, that Quovadx tells me has been fixed in 5.4) ..

If you move off of Windows, I suggest that you contract some time with Quovadx, as I understand that there is some non-intuitive differences, and modifications to some scripts.

Little on sizing ..

We have about 100 threads in our production site, and we handle approximately 600,000 messages outbound from the engine each day.

I suggest that you get fast spinning disks. We have two disks that are mirrored, and an identical fail-over system that has its mirrored disks, which are mirrored with production using DRDB.

We have 2GB of memory and 2 Xeon (hyperthreading) 3 GHz processors in each box..

Dennis

[Rick Martin]

Nancy,

We’ve been running multiple versions of Cloverleaf/QDXi (from 3.8.1 to 5.4) on a Windows 2000 Server platform for the past 6 years.  While we’re not currently an extremely high-volume shop; our systems have been stable.  

The only issue I seem to have recur is with Cloverleaf successfully making a network connection when bringing up a outbound connection to a host at the other end of a VPN; sometime we have to stop/restart several times before the connection will establish.

We’re looking at moving to Windows Server 2003 in the next few months as our existing hardware is coming to end-of-life.

What types of issues have you experienced?

Thanks, Rick

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