Microsoft attempting to make its mark in automated computing

SAN FRANCISCO, California – Microsoft is quickly catching up in the 64-bit computing space but it still has some work to do to prove its mettle in automated computing.

The company launched its 64-bit operating system, Windows Server 2003, here in late-April.

The server platform is Microsoft’s most significant product "in terms of what it means for IT professionals and data centers," said Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer repeatedly during the event.

It boasts of Microsoft’s biggest advancement in security, something that is "so tattooed in our brains," said Balmer.

Win Server 2003 is "secure by design, secure by default, and secure in deployment," he added.

New security features include a redesigned Internet Information Services 6.0, which lowers potential attacks by restricting network access; the shipping of Win Server 2003 in a lock-down state, with over 20 services turned off by default or running with reduced privileges; and enhanced public key infrastructure services to provide a simple certificate infrastructure.

And if a TPC-C benchmark is a good enough indication, the Wintel alliance has won "the ultimate performance crown," which Intel COO Paul Otellini said has always eluded them both.

A HP Superdome with 64 Intel Itanium 2 chips, running Win Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit), outperformed the nearest Unix-on-Risc system to become the fastest performing single server, surpassing the 600,000 tmpC mark.

Otellini also attempted to send out a strong price-performance message to the audience, showing that at $9.82/tpmC (new-order transactions performed per minute), the Wintel system’s price per tpmC is 66 percent lower than that for the Unix system.

Balmer also announced the availability of SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) and Visual Studio .Net 2003 – Microsoft’s latest application development toolkit, which makes incorporating Web services into apps easier.

Win Server 2003 is Microsoft’s effort to overhaul the data center, and the most important piece in that light is the Automated Deployment Services (ADS), according to Forrester principal analyst Frank Gillet.

ADS can intelligently provision Windows and related software for faster server deployment.

Win Server 2003 has features like Virtual Disk Service for managing storage area networks, and Resource Manager for controlling CPU and memory utilization as well.

However, Microsoft is still lagging behind in the increasingly hotly contested area of automated computing for data centers, trailing other IT big boys like Sun, IBM and HP.

Its virtual machine software, for instance, will be released only in the next few months, said Al Gillen, research director of IDC’s System Software. And its System Definition Model will only be out in 2004.

Gillen said HP probably has "the most compelling demonstrable technology" for automated computing today.

"HP’s utility data center is real. It works but you need significant investments in, for example, a multi-OS provisioning system," he said. "IBM had this (provisioning capability) for a long time but only for the zSeries."

But even with all the vendors’ advances in automated computing, there remains one big question – how the different technologies can interoperate in a heterogeneous IT environment.

"Their management components don’t work together. They only talk about how things can plug together," said Gillen. "It will be a decade or more before everything works together."