The basic installed SNA Server components are:
SnaBase Service
SnaServer Service
Link Services
NetView components
Of these components, the SnaBase service is the fundamental component of the SNA Server network. On the Microsoft BackOffice server, the purpose of SnaBase is to coordinate the SNA servers in the network according to their designated roles. In addition, SnaBase builds a list of available services in the domain and broadcasts the list of services provided by each server.
The SnaServer service component is the physical unit (PU) 2.1 node within an SNA Server. The SnaServer service interacts with all clients and other nodes on the SNA network.
Link Services are the software components of SNA Server that communicate with the device driver for a particular communication adapter (DLC 802.2, SDLC, X.25, DFT, Channel, or Twinax). Link services define the protocol used between the SNA Server software and the communications adapters in a computer.
Based on these brief descriptions of the primary SNA Server components, it is obvious that SNA Server, unlike other Microsoft BackOffice components (Systems Management Server and Microsoft SQL Server), primarily requires "kernel" level resources. In other words, SNA Server does not really compete with the other Microsoft BackOffice applications, as it is not considered to be a "disk bound" application. Rather, it is more reliant upon the availability of processor (CPU) and memory system resources. Hence, it competes for resources with Windows NT Server processes such as RAS, IP routing, and so on. In fact, SNA Server is architected to take full advantage of Windows NT multithreading and asynchronous completion, in order to scale gracefully as system processors are added to a Microsoft BackOffice hardware platform.
In light of this information, optimizing a Microsoft BackOffice platform for SNA Server is relatively easy.