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Microsoft’s long-delayed Windows Server 2003 will make its grand entrance
in San Francisco Thursday, carrying with it the company’s hopes to become a
player in the high-end supercomputers, clusters and mainframes markets, as
well as enterprise storage.
Based on preliminary tests by customers and industry groups running beta
versions of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft claims the new product is the best performing Windows server operating system to date when compared with previous versions. Additionally, it represents the largest software development project in the company’s history. It totals about 50 million lines of code — the work of more than 5,000 developers and 2,500 testers over a three year period.
Security is the primary reason for Windows Server 2003’s 16 to 18 month
delay, according to Laura DiDio, analyst with The Yankee Group.
“They will ship no product that is not secure,” DiDio said, speaking to
Microsoft’s commitment to its Trustworthy Computing Initiative, unveiled in
January 2002 in an effort to secure the company’s code. “That is the main
reason that they attributed to the 16 to 18 month delay in shipping Windows
Server 2003.”
The company had originally slated Windows Server 2003, then known
as Windows .NET Server, for release in 2001. But the Trustworthy Computing
Initiative placed everything else on hold, as the company spent more than
$200 million on a line-by-line audit of its code by more than 13,000
Windows Division employees.
“Windows Server 2003 is the highest quality Windows server operating system
ever released. It was designed and built with security as the top
priority,” Bill Veghte, vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Server
Division, said when he announced the operating system’s release to
manufacturing in March.
Todd Wanke, project manager for Windows Server, who was responsible for
overseeing the day-to-day development of Windows Server 2003, added, “My
job was to make sure that, day after day, everyone on the development and
testing teams was working toward the same quality milestones. Quality was
our primary concern. We weren’t afraid to let the product release date slip
if that’s what we needed to do for quality.”
Gunning for the High End
Windows Server 2003 will support both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures,
scaling from a Web edition geared for Web serving to a Datacenter Edition
for high-end servers which supports up to 32-way SMP and 64 GB of RAM (up
to 512 GB on the 64-bit architecture). The Datacenter Edition also provides
eight-node clustering and load balancing services as standard features, and
on the 64-bit architecture it can support 64 processors.
“We set out with a goal to double the performance of Windows 2000 on common
workloads, and we’ve more than achieved that,” Brian Valentine, senior vice
president of Microsoft’s Windows Division, told internetnews.com.
Based on preliminary tests by customers and industry groups running beta
versions of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft claims the new product is the best
performing Windows server operating system to date when compared with
previous versions. The testing found:
- IT infrastructures ran up to 30 percent more efficiently
- A 20 to 30 percent reduction in the number of servers to perform the
same workload - Performance levels up to twice as fast across all workloads
- A 20 percent reduction in overall management costs
- 35 percent of customers were able to redeploy IT staff from server
management to higher value projects - A 50 percent reduction in deployment cost and 40 percent increase in
stability over similar Windows NT Server 4.0 infrastructure - Testers were able to build applications in half the time with twice the
performance - Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPPC) benchmarks ranked
Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 as the fastest 32-way online
transaction, with 433,107 transactions per minute.
The company has already shored up alliances with chipmakers to back up its
play for the high-end of the datacenter. Earlier in April, Intel, one of
Microsoft’s oldest and most important partners, said Windows Server 2003 will
support Intel’s Itanium 2 family of 64-bit processors, marking the
first formal release of the operating system supporting the Itanium product
family. That means no more ‘limited editions’ will be required for Itanium
support under Windows.
“Intel has been doing multi-processor servers in the last eight years, and
with Intel and Windows-based servers, we are really playing up to the high
end,” Intel Itanium Processor Family Product Line Manager Mike Graf told
internetnews.com at the time.
But Intel isn’t alone. Microsoft’s Valentine was on hand at AMD’s Tuesday
launch
of its new Opteron processors, which offer an x86-based 64-bit architecture
that is compatible with 32-bit applications.
“We’ve been working with AMD since the beginning on this project,”
Valentine said. “64-bit computing; we think it is the wave of the future.”
He added, “It’s about running a Windows server and a Windows workstation in
64-bit with any workload the customer may want to run on it.”
Valentine said 64-bit Windows Server 2003 on the IA-64 architecture will be
available beginning with the launch Thursday, while support for AMD’s
x86-64 architecture will follow in the coming months.
More on Page 2
Enterprise Storage
With storage one of the few technology segments that analysts agree is
still going strong (a recent Merrill Lynch survey of U.S. and U.K. chief
information officers found that storage is the number 1 priority of CIOs,
and CIO Magazine has reported that 22 percent of IT budgets are allocated
to storage), Microsoft is also counting on Windows Server 2003 to help it
capture a larger slice of that market with new storage management features.
“At Microsoft, we have risen to the challenge by introducing a set of
significant new and enhanced storage management features in Windows Server
2003,” said Zane Adam, director of product management and marketing for
Microsoft’s Enterprise Storage Division (announced last spring at the 2002
Storage Networking World conference). “These features make it easier for
database, storage and network administrators to maintain and manage disks
and volumes, backup and restore data, and connect to Storage Area Networks
(SANs). And we’re not just talking about the large enterprises — small- to
medium-sized businesses are facing the same storage problems and can
benefit from these solutions as well.”
Among the new enhancements are:
- Virtual Disk Service (VDS), which provides APIs that allow storage
hardware vendors to extend Windows storage features, supporting Directly
Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs with a
single management interface - Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which provides an infrastructure for
creating a point-in-time copy of a single volume or multiple volumes, and
also allows users of client computers to view and recover previous
snapshots of their files without involving IT - Improved SAN support, including flexible volume mounting, improved SAN
Host Bus Adapter (HBA) interoperability, a Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) Driver
Development Kit which allows storage vendors to create interoperable
multi-pathing solutions in both Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, and
support
(by June) for the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI),
recently ratified
by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - Automated System Recovery (ASR), which enables ‘bare metal restore’
(clean installation) of a server without having to load the entire
image.
Deep Integration
While Microsoft is hoping that Windows Server 2003 is the wedge it needs to
break UNIX’s stranglehold on high-end datacenter servers, the product is
also a cornerstone
of the company’s .NET strategy — together with its Visual Studio .NET
development environment, the Windows XP operating system and the
forthcoming Office 2003 and ‘Yukon’ SQL Server offerings.
Windows Server 2003 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 (which will be released in
tandem with the server operating system) are tightly integrated as part of
Microsoft’s plan to create a cohesive ecosystem on which businesses can
build their Web services. Windows Server 2003 fully leverages the .NET
Framework, the platform infrastructure that defines Microsoft’s Web
services push. Meanwhile, Visual Studio .NET 2003 is an incremental
advancement to the company’s integrated development environment (IDE), a
developer tool suite which at its core contains the vision of enabling
development teams to share in large-scale projects across the entire
development life cycle, even when mixing components of various languages
and using a variety of deployment architectures, from the Internet to
Windows to mobile devices.
The company is positioning Windows Server 2003 as the perfect deployment
platform for applications built with Visual Studio .NET 2003 (though it
also plans to support Windows 2000 Server with the .NET Framework and
Windows 98 or later for the deployment of smart client applications).
Office 2003 will contain the tools necessary to create and consume XML
documents, while Yukon will embed the Common Language Runtime (CLR), along
with support for multiple programming languages, allowing developers to
work with whatever languages they favor. A new version of Visual Studio
.NET, currently dubbed ‘Visual Studio for Yukon,’ is likely to accompany
that release and will feature .NET Framework 2.0
Windows Server 2003 is integral to Microsoft’s plan because, as ZapThink
Co-Founder and Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer puts it, “they feel the
operating system really is the application server. They’ve never had a
separate application server product.” In a Web services model, the
application server, which handles all application operations between users
and an organization’s backend business applications or databases, takes on
much greater importance.
“They see every application that they’re going to build on top of Windows
Server 2003 as being Web services-enabled,” Schmelzer said. “It’s really
going to be a fully functioning citizen in the corporate architecture.”
Will Customers Bite?
But the key question remains: Will all the new functionality convince
customers to upgrade to the new operating system?
A recently completed Yankee Group Survey, conducted with Sunbelt Software,
found that 34 percent of businesses plan to make the upgrade, but 15
percent have decided to avoid the new operating system and 50 percent have
not yet decided. The survey questioned 1,000 IT managers and chief
technology officers. Yankee Group’s DiDio said 50 percent of the
respondents were in the small and medium business market (SMB), with
between one and 1,000 end users, and 15 percent came from very large
enterprises.
DiDio said that constrained IT budgets have led to three and a half to
four, five or even six year upgrade cycles in many businesses, and many IT
decision makers may decide to try to wait Microsoft out and upgrade with
the next version of Windows Server. That product is code-named Blackcomb,
and is expected in 2005 or 2006.
“Microsoft’s biggest competitor in this space right now is itself,” she
said.
Of those who do plan to migrate, 7 percent said they would make the switch
as soon as the software ships, 11 percent said within three to six months,
5 percent said within six to nine months, and 14 percent said within the
next 12 months. A further 63 percent said they have no definitive plans to
migrate.
