Despite the hype when it was launched, Windows 2000 Datacenter has
not taken the mainframe market by storm. However, it has found
favour as a way of consolidating Microsoft applications on the
server. Ben Tudor reports.
Remember Windows 2000 Datacenter? The Microsoft operating system
Unisys helped write as Bill Gates' way in to the wallets of the
big-box users? We haven't heard a lot about it lately. Is it dead?
No - but the spin that Windows 2000 Datacenter Server is a
mainframe killer certainly is. Instead, Datacenter is finding its
own niche.
Microsoft's datacentre product has sold well in the year since its
launch.
According to figures from analyst firm IDC, Microsoft has now
shipped between 220,000 and 250,000 copies - roughly the same as
Sun's Solaris managed during the same period. As a system that is
pre-installed on hardware and is not available as a shrink-wrapped
product, that's not bad going.
It is true that most of these systems are currently below the
eight-processor threshold that Microsoft defines as being the true
failover threshold, but this may change in July with the
introduction of an eight to 16-way server from IBM alongside
Unisys' ES7000, both of which run Datacenter.
Add in the fact that Microsoft's Datacenter resellers - Compaq, HP
and IBM among them - are required to sell Datacenter as a serviced
solution rather than a standalone operating system, and things look
even rosier.
In the UK, Datacenter users include Abbey National,
Freemarkets.com, Credit Suisse First Boston and Ragnarok
Systems.
Microsoft took great pains to make the launch of Datacenter go as
well as possible. "Microsoft wanted the product in the marketplace,
and it wanted successful installs," says Dan Kusnetzky,
vice-president of systems software at IDC. Kusnetsky explains that
the software giant priced potentially failure-prone customers out
of the running. "Microsoft could not afford a failure of any kind,"
he says.
True, the original aim of availability on a wide range of hardware
hasn't really worked. At its inception, Windows 2000 Datacenter
Edition was available for just one platform: Unisys' ES7000 Intel
mainframe, featuring cellular multiprocessing (CMP) on Intel
processors - something of a rarity in high-end datacentre
machines.
The ES7000 was also relatively cheap compared to other 32-processor
systems such as Sun's much vaunted E10000, which costs from £1m
upwards, while ES7000 prices start at about £250,000.
Unfortunately, despite having a very impressive piece of hardware
that has sold well, Unisys, in many ways the main proponent of
Datacenter Server behind Microsoft, has seen its operating system
strategy become somewhat tangled.
Unisys has tried desperately to escape from its Unix involvement,
despite being one of SCO's biggest Unixware resellers, so that it
can tie itself to Microsoft operating systems.
The reason for the move is that Unixware has one hell of a
competitor in the far cheaper Linux operating system. As Unisys
chief executive Larry Weinbach said shortly after the launch of the
ES7000 as a Datacenter platform, "We moved to NT because it was
cheap, and we could sell a lot of it. Unix is expensive, and sells
in smaller numbers."
The result was that while many Unisys customers happily plumped for
the Microsoft solution, a fair number stuck with Unixware,
particularly those that had mission-critical applications running
on the venerable operating system.
The first UK customer for the ES7000 was the Isle of Man
government, which bought the machine to do what Unisys was keen to
play down: the box ran Unixware as well as Windows 2000 Datacenter
Edition.
While Datacenter came pre-loaded on the Unisys box, the customer
had actually bought it for the Unixware option to consolidate
existing Unixware servers.
The ES7000 story has been further complicated by an unsuccessful
OEM (original equipment manufacturer) strategy and divisions in the
market on the question of hardware firepower.
Datacenter is also still not scaling to 32 processors in real-world
implementations, while Solaris is now up to 52 processors.
Microsoft's competitors are happy to point out the question this
raises. "While the Windows 2000 Datacenter architecture will reach
into the 32-processor range, we believe the sweet spot is at 16
processors," says Tikiri Wanduragala, senior consultant for IBM's
eServer xSeries range in Europe.
"Mainframe technology for the Intel architecture is an outdated
model. The market wants spanning, clustering and symmetrical
multiprocessing."
Wanduragala may have a point. What is certain is that while
Datacenter was pitched as a mainframe killer by Microsoft and
Unisys, it has become something else entirely.
"New technology does not necessarily replace old, it simply sits
alongside it and does other jobs," explains Kusnetsky.
"For example, just because someone throws a new bridge over the
Thames, it does not mean that all road traffic will only go over
that bridge - it simply swallows a share of the traffic."
Microsoft sees things slightly differently. "One of the biggest
things we have seen over the past year has been server
consolidation," says Mark Tennant, Microsoft's Windows Servers
product manager in the UK.
"One bank in London was at the point of buying a building to house
its servers before it took the consolidation route. However,
customers are now citing other reasons: high availability and low
cost in their Windows servers, which leads into consolidation quite
happily."
Tennant is quite satisfied with the development of Datacenter, and
cites examples of datacentre managers who would never normally give
Windows a second glance now considering the product.
But it is still a niche product. Kusnetsky says, "Datacenter is
still establishing a track record. According to Microsoft, it is
'doing' enterprise computing, but what is often being done is
e-mail in the form of Exchange. Personally, I cannot view that in
the same category as accounting solutions."
This sums up the current situation for those looking to adopt
Datacenter pretty well: if you need server consolidation for your
Microsoft applications, then it is an interesting option. But don't
expect Microsoft to boot the mainframe old boys out of their
private club just yet.
What do you get with windows 2000 datacenter?
Microsoft
Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition is a bulked up version of the
company's 32-bit operating system designed for systems of up to 16
processors and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP).
Despite claims on Microsoft's Web site, the company has only
demonstrated 32-way capability. The system also supports up to
64Gbytes of memory.
Microsoft has tied Datacenter installs to heavy services and
support contracts. It will provide system testing, and the hardware
supplier will be obliged to provide support and be qualified to
provide at least part of the support and certification
itself.
www.microsoft.com/windows2000/datacenter