“Last Thursday in Basle, Switzerland Microsoft unveiled the full
range of the .NET enterprise product in what was both the largest
product release in their history, and a wholesale repositioning of
Microsoft operating systems towards top end ‘mainframe-style’
services and support.”
“Microsoft proudly pointed to the recent Harry Potter
phenomenon, where barnesandnoble.com used the ApplicationServer2000
product to ‘scale-out’ and rack up an extra 100 temporary servers
to prepare for the demand for the new edition in the range. These
servers were quickly dismantled and re-deployed when the demand had
passed. Other high profile early adopters include Lycos, who claim
to have stress-tested every platform including Sun-Oracle and Linux
and opted for Windows 2000 server clusters as the best strategic
solution.”
“Microsoft want to commoditise the transactional computing
market with cheap Intel based clusters administered through simple
GUIs. Chris believes Linux and open-source are too complex to
install and too expensive to project manage to be a real
threat.”