Confirming our earlier piece about Microsoft Corp’s plans to re- engineer future versions of Windows NT to address scalability issues, set to be announced in full on May 20th in New York (CI No 3,129), InfoWorld hears that the operating system will be split into three parts after release 5.0 comes out next year. There will be a high-end data center edition written for Intel Corp’s 64-bit Merced chip, a business user edition, and a consumer edition to replace Windows 95, hears the paper, quoting Moshe T Dunie, vice president of Microsoft’s Windows operating system division, who talked about the new scheme at last week’s WinHEC conference in San Francisco. The high-end version will support hierarchical storage management, volume management and disaster recovery. Before then, Microsoft is expected to improve its symmetrical multiprocessing for eight-way systems with NT 5.0, and is planning a small-business version of NT Server, codenamed Sam, which will include support for modem pooling and a fax server and proxy server.
