Microsoft Corp isn’t hiding its light under a bushel as far as its ambitions for high-end systems based on Windows NT are concerned. Yesterday’s Scalability Day strategy meeting saw the company wheel out heavyweight industry support for the expected Enterprise Editions of its BackOffice family of products, which were duly launched (CI No 3,129), along with endorsements from all and sundry to the effect that, despite much evidence to the contrary, NT will scale up beyond the personal computer server. Windows NT Server 4.0, SQL Server 6.5 and BackOffice Server 4.0 were all launched in Enterprise Edition versions, along with appropriately upgraded service and support agreements. Customers no longer need to rely on expensive Unix solutions said Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz. NT Server Enterprise will now support up to eight way symmetrical multiprocessing and includes integrated clustering, Microsoft’s Viper Transaction Server and Falcon Message Queue Server. SQL Server 6.5 Enterprise adds support for clustering, high-end symmetrical multi-processors and large memory configurations, making it more suitable for online transaction processing, data warehousing and internet integration, claims Microsoft. And Backoffice 4.0 Enterprise includes all the other BackOffice Enterprise products along with Exchange Server, Proxy Server, SNA Server, Systems Management Server and Site Server electronic commerce software. But although NT Server and SQL Server should ship in the third quarter of this year, full-blown BackOffice Server 4.0 is not due to ship until the first quarter of next year. Pricing was not announced. Supporters cheerleading at the Microsoft Scalability Day included Compaq Computer Corp, Computer Associates Inc, Data General Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, EMC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, NEC Corp, NCR Corp, SAP AG, Siemens Pyramid Information systems Inc, Stratus Computer Corp, Tandem Computers Inc, Unisys Corp and Veritas Software Corp. Compaq said it had achieved 1 billion transactions a day using a distributed database across 20 Compaq Proliant Servers running NT and SQL Server, along with five servers running Microsoft Transaction Server software and a 2.4 terabyte disk farm of data – exceeding some of the world’s largest commercial mainframe systems, it insisted. Data General previewed its Teraback online backup server it said was capable fo backing up 100Gb of SQL Server data in an hour. And Stratus said it had combined NT Server and SQL Server with its RADIO CLuster high-availability servers to create a 7×24 high availability system.
