Microsoft Demonstrates Advances in High Availability and Scalability At Tech·Ed 99

DALLAS, May 21, 1999 — Today at Tech ·Ed 99, Microsoft Corp. and industry partners IBM Corp., Intel Corp. and Sequent Computer Systems Inc. showcased enhanced multinode clustering, server consolidation and management solutions that extend the availability and scalability of the Microsoft® Windows® Server operating system platform. The technologies demonstrated include large-memory support using Intel’s Physical Address Extension (PAE) on an Intel 8-processor Pentium III Xeon server, Sequent’s workload management tool, and new technology from IBM that allows the Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 Server operating system Enterprise Edition to cluster and manage up to eight servers. In addition, Microsoft announced new high-availability resources including
“best practices”
guides and tools for customers.

Enterprise customers want to lower the costs associated with their IT infrastructure while deploying highly reliable and manageable systems. Techniques used to reach these goals include server consolidation, server and resource management, clustering, and the application of rigorous operational procedures. Today’s announcements will enable customers and systems integrators to deploy Windows Server family-based systems while reducing costs, improving manageability, experiencing higher levels of uptime, and achieving greater efficiency.

“Microsoft is excited by the significant investments and resulting enhancements being made by IBM, Intel and Sequent to the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 platforms,”
said Deborah Willingham, vice president of marketing for the Business and Enterprise Division at Microsoft.
“Customers worldwide rely on Microsoft and its associates for cost-effective enterprise solutions. Today’s announcements demonstrate how enterprise customers can benefit from the rapid rate of innovation on the Windows platform.”

New Technologies for Server Consolidation

Enterprise customers want to lower the cost of their IT infrastructure by consolidating workloads on a smaller number of very powerful, centralized SMP servers that are professionally managed. The demonstration today at Tech · Ed 99 illustrated the performance and scalability benefits of PAE-based large-memory support with a prototype Intel 8-processor Pentium III Xeon system based on Intel’s Profusion chip set running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server with 8 GB of physical memory. In addition, Microsoft used the same hardware platform to demonstrate multi-instance database capabilities of the upcoming version of Microsoft SQL Server TM . These systems are ideal candidates for server consolidation and will be available soon from a wide range of hardware OEMs.

New Workload Management Technologies

System managers running diverse workloads on large SMP servers want the ability to schedule and manage the allocation of server resources such as memory and CPU across those workloads. Microsoft is working closely with several enterprise system vendors to implement a full range of solutions for workload management and server partitioning. Process Control, a new management tool jointly developed by Sequent and Microsoft Corp, assists system managers in managing the allocation of critical server resources, including processor affinity, scheduling priority, allowable number of processes, memory use amounts and limits to the amount of CPU time used for a specific workload. This tool, which uses the Job Object Application Programming Interface, will be a component of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. More information is available at http://www.sequent.com/ .

New Solutions for High-Availability Environments

As companies increasingly rely on information technology in their core business processes, they need a broad range of high-availability solutions to enable them to meet stringent service-level agreements for both internal and external customers in a cost-effective manner. Complementing Microsoft’s advancements in high availability, IBM announced new clustering technology that extends the capabilities of Microsoft Cluster Server to manage and enable
8-node clusters on Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition. The technology incorporates
“any-to-any”
failover and cascading failover support to provide greater uptime for critical enterprise resource planning, data mining and e-commerce applications at a lower cost. The solution from IBM includes planning and implementation services and an optional 99.9 percent system uptime guarantee from IBM Global Services. More information can be found at http://www.ibm.com/netfinity/ .

High-Availability Best Practices

Recognizing the importance of operational practices in a total high-availability solution, Microsoft announced the availability of new planning resources for customers, including best practices information and tools. These resources include a High-Availability Guide that documents important operational practices, a tool called Uptime that allows customers to obtain details on the availability of their Windows NT Server-based system, and several technical white papers focused on reliability and availability. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ .

Customers can get more information on these technologies and related Tech · Ed 99 activities at http://events.microsoft.com/events/teched/ .

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.

For more information, press only:

Amy Hamilton, Waggener Edstrom, (503) 443-7000, [email protected]

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