The changes in Windows 2000 from NT 4 are quite significant, but they were long in coming. What was the wait all about?
Microsoft wants your company to shut off its mainframes and do your firm's work on big servers running NT. That's why there is a version of Windows 2000 Server called Datacenter Server.
Microsoft is also hoping "enterprise" customers will exploit Server (nee MTS) and COM+ to write gobs of new and hardware-hungry distributed application. Before they can accomplish that, however, they need to clear three hurdles: reliability, availability, and scalability.
NT Must Be More Reliable
Since their appearance in the late '70s, microcomputer-based network operating systems have been seen as fundamentally different from "big-system" OSes like IBM's MVS and OS/400, Compaq's Open VMS, and the myriad flavors of Unix. PC-based network operating systems weren't exactly seen as toys, but neither were they seen as something that one would base one's business on, if that business was truly critical. For example, it's hard to imagine the New York Stock Exchange announcing that they'd decided to get rid of their current trading system and to replace it with a NetWare 4.1 or NT 4-based client-server system. PC-based stuff just wasn't (and largely still isn't) seen as sufficiently reliable yet to take on the big guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment