News
Application Center 2000 Released to Early Adopters
- By Scott Bekker
- 12/06/2000
Microsoft Corp.’s
Application Center 2000 is no longer vaporware. The product that’s been in development
for two years has been released to early adopter partners, according to Bob
Pulliam, technical product manger for Application Center 2000.
Those
partners include application hosting companies Data Return and Digex Inc.,
Embark.com, which manages the application and recruitment process of more than
500 colleges and universities, and the Lycos Network, one of the Web’s most
visited portals.
Lycos, in particular, will be a stiff test of
Application Center 2000’s abilities, since it will serve up to 300 million page
views a week with Windows 2000 and Application Center 2000, while (hopefully)
maintaining near 100 percent availability.
Application Center 2000, for those unaware, is Microsoft’s
effort to add clustering and load balancing to Windows 2000. The key is being
able to scale out, Pulliam says, and not just for the big guns. Microsoft
targets Application Center 2000 as “scaling out for the masses. We found that
people who were getting scaling out to work were large IT shops. We want to bring
that down so there are benefits for IT shops as well as smaller customers.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Application Center 2000 is only
available on the Windows 2000 Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter Server
products. Pulliam says that technical issues keep it from being used with
Windows NT. Windows 2000 shops, however, will enjoy the fact that network load
balancing is finally available with Application Center 2000, a heretofore
missing piece of the puzzle.
Expect to see the final release of Application Center 2000
in the first quarter of 2001, Pulliam says. It’s a stand-alone product with
licensing, like others in the .NET server line, on a per-processor basis.
Pulliam, for his part, is glad to have Application Center
2000 shipping in its “near-finished” form. “The primary thing is the fact that
we do have production customers running the product. We announced it over a
year ago, and it is major step [to] have production customers and release
candidate one.” -- Keith Ward
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.