The Lab Guys Feel Nostalgic

NT's emerging technology evokes memories

Some of the Lab Guys are young, and dedicated to keeping pace with thisfast-moving industry, no matter how much caffeine it takes to keep them going. Others, however, are older and have accumulated a fair amount of experience dealing with computers. In contrast to the younger Lab Guys, the older Lab Guys rely on their wit and wile to navigate the NT market.

Lately, the older Lab Guys have been able to sit back and gleefully watchthe younger Lab Guys feverishly work to get up to speed on emerging NTtechnology. Why aren't the older Lab Guys in a dither about all of the new NTtechnology? That's easy--much of this "new" technology in NT is, infact, tried-and-true technology that the computer industry has used for years.For once, the older Lab Guys get to use knowledge they've had stored in theirheads for quite some time. The newer Lab Guys must fill their brain cells withnew information.

Now, don't misunderstand us. We're not saying that Microsoft is simplybrushing the dust off the old technology and shoving it into its products.Obviously Microsoft modernized all the technology coming to NT and gave it anappropriate NT spin. But basics are basics. Hierarchical Storage Management(HSM) by any other name is still a multitiered storage system.

What technology are we talking about? Well, the current list of goldenoldies now playing in the NT market include:

*HSM: A convenient means to conserve hard disk resources by automaticallyoffloading and reloading seldom-used files to slower storage. HSM will be partof NT Server 5.0.

*On-the-fly volume management: The ability to manage the characteristics ofyour hard disk and volume assignments without rebooting to put changes intoeffect. This method will also be part of NT Server 5.0

*Media services layer (NT Media Services--NTMS): A method of standardizingstorage devices and the associated media for better access and manageability.Guess what? That's right, NTMS will be available with NT Server 5.0.

* Kereberos security: A more secure and more flexible means of logon andaccess authorization. This security is coming to NT Server 5.0.

* Transaction processing (Microsoft Transaction Server--MTS): A distributedprocessing methodology that breaks application workloads into small,self-contained processing units. This methodology is available for NT Server4.0.

* Asynchronous and synchronous messaging: A queuing interface added toprovide compatibility with other host queuing interfaces (e.g., IBM's MessageQueue Interface--MQI) and to deliver new application-to-applicationcommunication transports. This interface is coming soon to an unknown NT versionnumber.

*Failover clustering: The capability to have one server take over foranother in the event of a serious failure. This capability will be part of theEnterprise Edition of NT Server.

*Multiuser NT (or the Windows-based Terminal Server): Support formultiple, thin-client terminals all sharing the resources of a single, common NTServer system. This support is coming soon to an unknown NT version number.

This list makes some of us nostalgic about systems we have worked on.Remember Digital Equipment's VMS machines with their sophisticated clusteringand message queuing facilities? Or how about those mainframes and their HSMcapabilities? Or Tandem Computers and transaction serving? Or UNIX and volumemanagement? Yep, it's déjà vu.

In our minds, rediscovering old technology is a good thing, and not justbecause we get to use our existing brain cells. In fact, we see two importantbenefits to these developments.

First, these developments bring NT Server up to speed with othercommercial-grade midrange computer systems. And we're not talking about justUNIX here--although if you listen to Microsoft too long, you might forget thatother operating systems are available. These new capabilities put NT on a parwith UNIX and with OpenVMS, MPE, OS/400, and the rest of the midrangeoperating systems.

Second, to implement these "new" capabilities in NT, Microsofthad to bring in some mature developers. We mean no offense to the NT developerstaff of the past, but the influx of more experienced developers brings acertain maturity and stability to the NT team. We like the idea of Microsoftlearning from past experience. And as a bonus, it makes some of us feel goodabout our age.