REDMOND, Wash., Aug. 2, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the public availability of beta 2 of Microsoft® Application Center 2000, the deployment and management tool for applications built on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 operating system, and a key member of the .NET enterprise server family. Application Center makes the management of a cluster of Web servers as easy as managing a single machine. This public beta of Application Center 2000 will be the first opportunity for companies of all sizes to bring enterprise-level scalability and simplified management to their Web and COM+ applications. Application Center 2000 also enables mission-critical availability through software scaling (or scaling out), a fault-tolerant architecture that employs multiple off-the-shelf servers as a unified resource. Developers and IT professionals can now register for the Application Center 2000 beta 2, which is scheduled to be shipped within two to four weeks, at http://www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter/ .
In addition, Microsoft today announced pricing and licensing for Application Center 2000. Application Center, which is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2000, will have an estimated retail price of $2,999 per processor, in alignment with the licensing model for the entire .NET enterprise server family announced last month.
“This public beta is a crucial landmark on the road map to .NET,”
said Chris Atkinson, vice president of the .NET Developer Solutions Group at Microsoft.
“The combination of Windows 2000 and Application Center 2000 will enable enterprise-class scalability while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of building and managing high-availability Web infrastructures.”
“Application Center 2000 improves our ability to manage the servers we have, while at the same time increasing scalability,”
said Philip Joung, director of technology at Embark.com.
“We currently have a system administration staff of six, and I expect that even though we have plans to almost double the number of servers we have, we’ll only need to add one more person.”
“Application Center 2000 will give us a true component/business logic tier,”
said Shawn Bice, director of engineering at Digex Inc.
“Application Center will also provide Digex with the high degree of scalability we need, as well as the ability to rapidly expand or rebuild clusters with minimal human intervention.”
Application Center 2000 provides a suite of deployment, management, monitoring and diagnostic tools. Some of the product features include the following:
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Single application image. Users create a single definition for each Web-based or component-based application that lists the contents, components and configuration settings. This definition simplifies management and deployment tasks.
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Application load balancing. The application load is distributed across the cluster using the simplified and centralized management of Network Load Balancing and Component Load Balancing for improved performance.
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Fault tolerance. Clusters can withstand software and hardware failures at any point in the system without disrupting application service.
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Application staging and deployment. System administrators can easily duplicate entire applications from one server to another. This can be used, for example, to accurately promote applications through the software life cycle: development, testing, staging and production.
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Application synchronization. Application content, configuration and components are synchronized across all the computers in the server cluster.
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Real-time performance and health monitoring. Performance and event log data can be viewed for a server or group of servers, all from a single console. System administrators have the tools to proactively improve system availability and performance.
About Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET, announced June 22 at Forum 2000, is Microsoft’s vision for creating the next generation of software, which melds computing and communications in a revolutionary way. This vision offers developers, businesses and consumers the ability to harness technology on their terms and with the tools they need to create truly distributed Web services.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
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