Microsoft Scalability Day

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates began Scalability Day today with akeynote speech in which he asserted the dominance of Windows NT over UNIXfor the most demanding business applications. Citing improved scalabilityand far lower costs, Gates said that the days of proprietary hardware and"big iron" are over.

"Any business of any size can now run its enterprise applications on Microsoft software and industry-standard hardware," said Gates. "Combining enterprise-class scalability with PC-industry volume economics will radically reshape the enterprise markets. The ongoing R&D investments by Microsoft and the industry will provide our customers still greater levels of scalability, interoperability, availability and manageability in the future."

Microsoft announced BackOffice Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition as well, which includes the new Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition. This newversion extends NT's scalability with support for larger SMP servers and more application RAM. It also comes with Microsoft Transaction Server andMicrosoft Message Queue Server software built-in.

Some of the demonstrations that occurred today include:

The most amazing thing about all this, of course, is that it is being donewith systems based on personal computers. "PC performance is improving at an incredible rate," Gates said. "The work done by Digital and Intel have given us engines to take a strong role on the desktop and move and be the highest volume servers out there. What it means for customers are high volume standard servers that give them lots of choices, and as they add servers they can mix and match."

Acceptance of NT in the Enterprise is a primary goal for Microsoft. Whilemany system administrators are adopting a wait-and-see attitude, it is only a matter of time before Microsoft makes serious inroads into thismarket