SAN FRANCISCO (02/18/2000) - A self-confident Microsoft Corp. made its bid for the high-end, mission-critical platform market this Thursday, rolling out Windows 2000 and touting the operating system's reliability and scalability.
After multiple delays and a protracted beta cycle, there were few surprises at the launch, though Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates still managed to impress the audience with some demonstrations of the operating system's features for mobile users, systems administrators and massive Web servers.
A crucial component of Microsoft's scalability strategy, the Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition, won't ship until the end of June. Microsoft announced a certification process to test and approve servers and other hardware to run with Datacenter Edition that hardware vendors said rigorously enforces a 99.9% uptime capability. While Windows 2000 Advanced Server will support eight-way multiprocessing and two-node clustering, Datacenter Edition will offer 32-way servers and clusters of as many as four nodes.
Henry Nash, director of development at Credit Suisse First Boston in London, said his company's main reason for considering Datacenter Edition is that the hardware and operating system will be certified as a whole. Nash said he's less interested in support for more than eight processors because such servers will be in short supply. Initially, Unisys Corp.'s ES7000, which scales up to 32 processors, is expected to be the only platform that will run Datacenter Edition on more than eight processors.
Even Windows 2000 devotees are taking a careful approach toward Windows 2000 for back-end applications.
Jim McHale, director of information technology operations at Stride Rite Corp. in Lexington, Mass., said his company has already moved all of its 1,100 desktops and file-and-print servers to Windows 2000. He said it has been a great benefit to reduce his three front-end operating systems - Windows 95, Windows NT and NetWare 4 - to one. But the shoemaking company's back-end services still run on RS/6000 and AS/400 machines from IBM. "Only time will tell whether [Windows 2000] is sufficiently scalable," he said.
Bob Lee, vice president of intranet and distributed technology at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab & Co., voiced similar skepticism. "Schwab isn't considering replacing our Unix-based Web servers, but as with all new technology, we will examine Windows 2000 to determine if it might be appropriate for future data center applications," Lee said.
"This is where Microsoft will be hardest pressed to erode a market," said Laura DiDio, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "No matter what they say, they're still playing catch-up with Unix."
Another factor holding back Windows 2000 is limited software availability.
Despite a list of 8,000 applications that are "ready" to run on the new operating system, very few applications actually use its new features. Only four server applications and 24 desktop applications passed the Windows 2000 certification process in time for the launch.
Gates delivered a list of Microsoft products that will ship this year, including the SQL Server 2000 database, Microsoft Exchange 2000 messaging server and the upcoming XML-based electronic-business server BizTalk Server 2000. Microsoft isn't saying when BackOffice 2000 will ship. It has released a BackOffice Server 4.5 Readiness Kit for Windows 2000, which will allow most BackOffice components - with the exception of Systems Management Server - to run on Windows 2000.
But the lack of applications is "not going to be a deal breaker," said DiDio, since relatively few companies are planning to migrate their servers this year.