ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 2, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today showcased its strategy for the evolution of enterprise computing, one that builds on the company’s family of manageable, ultrascalable Microsoft® Windows® Server software and includes plans for pretested and validated computer infrastructures and XML-based Web services, at MEC 2001, the Microsoft infrastructure planning and deployment conference.
Cliff Reeves, vice president for the Windows .NET Server Solutions Group at Microsoft, outlined the strategy during today’s keynote speech, highlighting how Windows 2000 Server software is setting benchmarks for scalability and enabling even the largest businesses and other enterprises to handle their increased server needs.
“The Windows 2000 Server family demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to producing a set of comprehensive server offerings that are highly flexible and truly multipurpose, without sacrificing individual capabilities such as scalability and manageability,”
Reeves said.
At the heart of Microsoft’s strategy are multiple ways for enterprises to accommodate the mushrooming workloads and user traffic they are channeling through central servers or groups of servers. Multidimensional scaling — the ability to scale up or scale out — allows enterprises to choose the option that best suits their needs, Reeves said. Windows 2000 Server software allows enterprises to scale out by supporting a large number of smaller servers and manage these servers centrally in a single network. Enterprises that add processors, memory and bandwidth to increase performance and capacity can also look to the Windows 2000 Server family, Reeves said. In particular, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server allows enterprises to scale up by supporting as many as 32 processors and up to 64 gigabytes of memory.
Since its launch in September 2000, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server has set the standard among enterprise servers for delivering high availability and scalability at a lower investment than traditional mainframe systems.
“Awareness is ever-increasing in terms of the Datacenter product. As we’ve proved the technology, people are saying they like the Datacenter features, like a high level of availability and high level of support,”
said Mark Feverston, vice president of Program Management Enterprise Servers for Unisys.
“And as time moves on, more and more people are aware of those offerings and are demanding those things.”
Reeves noted that a Unisys system running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server Limited Edition recently placed in the top 10 of a Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmark performance test — a first for an Intel-based system.
“People are beginning to see that the combination of Windows and Intel chip sets deserves a place at the high end of the enterprise server market,”
Reeves said.
“Customers now look to Windows as an alternative to proprietary hardware and software combinations.”
Enterprise-scale businesses such as Coop Atlantique have their own benchmarks to measure the value of the Datacenter Server. The well-known food distribution company in Western France chose a hardware platform running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server to centralize its customized, mainframe-based business applications.
In the coming years, Reeves said Microsoft plans to expand and enhance its enterprise computing offerings with pretested and validated computer infrastructures. These infrastructures
will consist of combinations of hardware and software designed and tested by Microsoft and its partners to make deployments of new technology more efficient and effective, and allow customers to get their products to market faster.
In addition to the prescriptional infrastructures, Microsoft envisions new XML-enabled Web services that will allow enterprises to easily and efficiently link their servers to mobile workers and outside vendors. These services, Reeves said, will be built by partners on the Microsoft .NET Platform and will help enterprises control everything from billing to notifications to business directories.
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