Microsoft ships Windows 2000 Datacenter

Microsoft has started shipping Windows 2000 Datacenter Server in the UK, claiming it offers a more flexible approach to delivering services than competing Unix systems.

Datacenter Server is being positioned by Microsoft as a credible alternative to Unix in mission critical environments, and as a means of delivering the scale and availability needed for line-of-business and ecommerce systems.

The operating system offers all the features found in Windows 2000 Advanced Server with the addition of support for up to 32 processors and 64Gb of memory. It also provides four-node clustering and process control workload management for added reliability.

The product will only be offered through certified Datacenter partners such as Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Unisys.

Michel Gambier, Microsoft's enterprise server marketing group product manager, said: "Datacenter brings the discipline of the mainframe environment to the NT environment in order to address the needs of the enterprise."

Gambier said he expected Datacenter to make inroads into the high-end server market by offering better value than competitive offerings from the likes of Sun Microsystems.

"We're offering choice to our customers with 12 different OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. With Sun you have to scale up if you reach the capacity of your server. With Microsoft, you can scale up and scale out by adding more servers - it's a more flexible approach," he said.

But Chris Sarfas, product marketing manager at Sun, refuted the claim and said that up to a point it was always possible to add more servers to either a Sun or Intel server-based installation.

"The issue is how manageable servers are. With Datacenter, Microsoft is trying to offer a step above what has been done with Intel-based servers which have generally been restricted to nothing more than eight-way. Sun has proven itself with 64 processors," said Sarfas.

"NT has not been very scalable nor manageable in large numbers. Microsoft has a lot of issues to cope with and still needs to prove itself in the data centre," he added.

Iain Stephen, a business manager at Compaq, said it expects around 10 to 12 per cent of its high-end volume market to come through Datacenter, starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

"The premium to go to Datacenter is not that much if you're already at eight-way," said Stephen, who was more cautious about people dropping Unix systems in favour of Datacenter.

"I don't know many people who will throw out Unix systems overnight. The cost argument usually isn't conclusive. It's difficult to get Sun customers to move, though its different with people who are on end-of-life platforms," he said.