|
How quickly we forget. One of the enduring images of the 1970s was the gas line: America held hostage by petroleum. It was not out of the ordinary for rational people to jump into their cars at midnight and drive across town to Richie Rich’s Gas or some other low-down provider just to save a few bucks and avoid the lines in the morning. There was still a line, but the wait was much more fun—an impromptu party. I picked up a lot of bad habits waiting in those lines, including smoking. It only took about 20 years to shed that one.
Rising oil prices are back in the news, threatening to turn that enduring image of 1990s extravagance—the SUV—into something of a white elephant. Politicians and diplomats have been scurrying about, trying to look effective, but the wall of bliss surrounding our economy has been breached. Aside from a few spikes and crazy IPOs, the stock markets appear to be leveling off. While I don’t expect everyone to suddenly envy me and my 1986 Honda Civic Wagon, which still manages to crank out about 30 miles per gallon, fuel efficiency will make a comeback. Other extravagances could fall out of favor: premium cable channels, pricey mineral waters, even triple decaf lattes.
If the bears, OPEC, and other economic influences truly scare off the bulls, what will happen in the halls of IT? As they did in the now-distant recessionary past, CIOs and their business management partners will look closely at unnecessary extravagances and put off projects that don’t offer near-term return on investment (ROI) or quantifiable, bottom-line efficiency improvements. Although we know there’s no going back from e-commerce, some will take a hard look at the ROI accruing from their heavy investments in the Internet and e-business (while others, of course, will rid themselves further of unnecessary physical assets). They will scrutinize expensive data warehouses and customer relationship management systems. However, one item may cause more teeth gnashing than any other: Windows 2000.
Microsoft’s new operating system family and related software are the result of the most extravagant software development effort in history. The numbers of hours, dollars, lines of code, and caffeinated beverages thrown at their development are probably beyond counting. Officially released in February, adoption of the full range of Windows 2000 software—Professional, Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter Server, and Active Directory—will take many months as customers wait for key patches, bug fixes, and frankly, success stories from their peers in the field.
Enterprise IT organizations are waiting most of all for Datacenter Server, expected before the end of the year. Even then, this initial release will only set the stage for a succession of releases over the next five years designed to take advantage of Intel’s IA-64 “Itanium” processor development. Datacenter should deliver four-node clusters for high avail- ability, setting the stage for expansion into eight-node and beyond. At the end of this journey, Microsoft and Intel envision IT in command of a scalable armada of 32- and 64-bit processor-based PC server clusters to support the gamut of computer-intensive applications, from complex decision-support analysis, to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and decryption, to e-commerce transaction processing.
Migration, particularly to the more advanced Windows 2000 features and services, will be a major effort. Systems integrators and Big Six-level service providers are gearing up to lend a hand. Technical education requirements will be significant. But if our robust times are losing steam, IT will have to decide: What is the ROI of this adventure?
My Kingdom for an OS
As long as we’re feeling nostalgic, remember when Seinfeld was going strong, Newt Gingrich was somebody, and the world quaked in fear of Microsoft? That wasn’t too long ago. What happened instead, of course, was that the Internet radically changed not only the computing landscape, but also how businesses view IT solutions. “IT is the business,” respected new economy sages like to say; but at the same time, business people have become less patient with technical minutia. IT solution providers must translate what they do into solutions that advance a business model. How will Windows 2000 accomplish that?
Thanks to the Internet, Microsoft has found itself running hither and yon, chasing a moving target: a computing paradigm morphing faster than at any time in history. The company has had to “turn the aircraft carrier” more than once, surely not an easy task when the proud crew has much at stake professionally. Microsoft, its admirers, and its enemies may have thought Windows 2000 would take over the world, but instead it took over Microsoft. Sucking up whatever management brainpower was left over, of course, has been this little antitrust matter going on in Washington.
Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows NT 4.0 has already put in place a pretty fair foundation for Windows 2000. According to IDC, Microsoft shipped two million copies of NT in 1999. The potential bad news for Microsoft is that these customers could be in no hurry to migrate to the advanced, higher-valued features of Windows 2000. Microsoft must concentrate its Windows 2000 artillery on head-to-head competition with Sun Microsystems Solaris, IBM’s AIX, SCO Unix, and of course Linux. NT has gained the company a foothold in the vital small-to-midsize enterprise (SME) market, but it will take Windows 2000’s best stuff to dislodge Unix and Linux. It will also take a winning argument regarding how Windows 2000 can support new economy business models.
Bargain Availability
E-commerce has turned 24x7 from being a cherished dream into a given. Back when gas lines were a reality, such high availability was the special preserve of the world’s largest banks, exchanges, financial service providers, and others that felt it necessary to pay enormous sums to make it happen. Behind the layers of Web and application servers, many major e-commerce sites remain dependent on “legacy” OLTP systems, often based on mainframes, for high availability. However, were it not for the incredible progress made in bringing OLTP and high-availability technology to Unix and other midrange platforms, e-commerce itself would be but a dream.
Availability and scalability have been the major bugaboos of NT, giving Unix- and even Linux-based competitors a significant advantage. But it is a capability that still does not come cheaply. With Windows 2000, it’s clear that Microsoft is determined to obliterate this difference. Affordable, easily managed scalability and high availability would certainly attract interest in the SME market, not to mention among application service providers hoping to compete against the big boys. Next to the bandwidth revolution, affordable, dependable 2437 availability will be what makes e-commerce—and some of those fragile new economy business models—really explode.
The BackOffice products, particularly the upcoming SQL Server “Shiloh” release, will be critical to Microsoft’s success. However, sucess will also require the abilities of Intel and a range of key hardware and systems management providers. With Intel’s most important contributions a little ways off, the spotlight is shining on recent releases from other Microsoft partners. In the systems management arena, BMC Software’s new Patrol 2000 is poised to become a dominant solution. The result of a massive integration effort, BMC has brought together tools from its recent acquisitions of Boole & Babbage, BGS, and New Dimension. BMC’s target is service-level management across extended enterprises that are being pushed to the wall by e-commerce. The company is also focusing on ease-of-use so that SME’s won’t need an army of specialized technicians to run their operations.
Unisys, featured prominently in Bill Gates’ February kick-off demonstration, is positioning itself to be a major player when Datacenter rolls out. With its ES-7000 servers, Unisys demonstrated the capabilities of its Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture, which can support up to 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors. Unisys says these can be easily upgraded to Itanium. CMP technology replaces the “shared nothing vs. shared something” architectural dilemma with a dynamic model that allows the system to reallocate memory, processors, and I/O channels as necessary. Compaq found the Unisys approach so impressive that it plans to resell the CMP technology as the core of its ProLiant eGeneration servers.
Finally, Hewlett-Packard’s LH 6000 and LT 6000r NetServer releases could drive down the cost of high availability significantly. The company is offering a six-way cluster capability for the price of four-way; HP has physically redesigned the rack for easier server consolidation, upgrading, and management. HP also has a “Dot-Com Financing Program,” similar to IBM’s, to get SME’s into the swing of e-business quickly.
Is the scent of recession in the air? I’ll leave it to the professional economists to give us the final answer. But if IT organizations are forced to tighten their belts, the one thing they can’t do without in an e-business age is 2437 availability. If Microsoft and its partners can demonstrate that Windows 2000 has the right stuff, at the right price, perhaps this OS will, dare we say, rule the world.
David Stodder (dstodder@cmp.com) is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.
|
|
|
|
|