By Jo Maitland at Comdex
Concerns over the robustness and ability that Windows 2000 will have to scale dominated Unisys Corp and Microsoft’s joint launch of a data center system running on the yet-to-be released Windows 2000 platform, at Comdex on Monday. Unisys is the systems integration partner in this effort. It is joined by ten other industry partners: Microsoft, EMC, Cisco Systems, Intel, Giganet, Imation, Mercury Interactive, NetIQ, Qlogic and StorageTek, all of which have contributed to a system they claim can support 4,000 e-business transactions per second and handle over three billion web hits every day. The data center has a 9-terabyte data warehouse built on Microsoft SQL Server 7, alongside Microsoft’s yet to be proven Active Directory product that the company claims will hold more than 50 million objects.
Discussing this project, which has been in the pipeline with Microsoft for over two years, Larry Weinbach, Unisys chairman and CEO said it is ideal for what he termed hybrid companies looking to move into an e-business environment from legacy systems. He added that dot-com start-ups would also go for this offering for its low cost of ownership, which he claimed was 20%- 30% less than the Unix Risk environment. Asked whether this data center is open to other partners, Weinbach said his company was always open to new partnerships and that no company just uses any one vendor’s systems. If someone has Oracle at the backend, of course we can still work with them, he said.
Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, took several questions from analysts and the press who were skeptical of Windows 2000’s ability to scale to support this kind of mission critical system. This product has been in development for nearly four years and it will be delivered later than we wanted – it is extremely important to Microsoft, he said. We have increased the reliability of the systems running on Windows, ramped up manageability and written services that allow creation of applications in the data center, Ballmer said. People have gone through the phase of discounting Windows in the data center.
EMC’s president and CEO, Mike Ruettgers extolled the virtues of EMC’s storage systems and software interconnect systems that will support this collaborative data center. Like the Unix and mainframe worlds, it takes a group of companies to put this type of data center together, he said. It was thought that NT would supplant Unix in the data center, however the delay in Scalability has held this up, he said. The release of Windows 2000 could still overtake Unix as users do not have to port to 45 different flavors of Unix as the majority of software will be written for Windows 2000.
High performance network hardware from Cisco, chip technology from Intel, high-speed cluster technology from Giganet, load testing software from Mercury Interactive, application management software from NetIQ, host bus adaptors from Qlogic and tape library technology from Imation and StorageTek make up the complete system.
Housed in a showcase at the Unisys booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the data center is running 24 hours a day throughout Comdex for visitors.
