Michael Dell is running it on his laptop. Dell is running it on its Web site. And if you care about stability, reliability and manageability, you should run it across your enterprise. That is the message the Dell chairman and CEO delivered Tuesday morning about Microsoft's new Windows 2000 operating system.
Dell's speech kicked off this week's Windows 2000 launch party, at which Microsoft is scheduled to officially introduce its long-awaited operating system on Thursday.
Internet use is growing exponentially among businesses and consumers, and Windows 2000 running on Dell's servers can provide a platform that is "as reliable as electricity" and can scale to meet the needs of growing businesses, Dell said.
"As the number of Internet users triples between now and 2003, businesses will be very vulnerable if their infrastructures can't keep pace," Dell said. "That's why we're migrating Dell.com to Windows 2000."
The company finished transitioning its Dell.com online store to Windows 2000 last Wednesday, the CEO said. Dell is currently handling 2.5 million customers per week at the Dell.com site, he added. Dell plans to transition the company's 35,000 e-mail accounts to Windows 2000 in the coming months, and roll out the new Microsoft operating system across its entire infrastructure thereafter.
The PC vendor plans to introduce a new hosting service, called DellHost.com, in the next couple of weeks that will be run on the new Microsoft operating system, Dell said, although he offered no further details.
"I've got Windows 2000 on my own Latitude LS notebook and it works great," Dell said.
Testimonials are important to Microsoft as the company tries to allay concerns about the stability of the new operating system, which has been delayed several times prior to its upcoming release this week. Dell was joined on stage by an executive from Ford, who is also in the process of rolling Windows 2000 out across the company.
"Windows 2000 was chosen for the reliability and scalability needed for our e-business initiatives ahead," the Ford executive said.
Besides reliability, Dell said manageability is a key benefit that customers are looking for in Windows 2000. The new operating system can deliver that capability thanks to a new feature called Active Directory, he said. Microsoft has been promoting its Active Directory, which helps management of a variety of resources on a network, including PCs, applications and users.
The Toronto School District is relying on Active Directory to run a network that includes 65,000 desktop computers and 60,000 users, Dell said. While Windows NT allowed 250 users to log on to the school board's Web server per second, Windows 2000 allows 10,000 users to log on per second, he claimed.
The new operating system should also benefit computer performance, Dell said. He played host to a demonstration in which two Web servers were set up side by side, one running Windows 2000, and the other running NT 4.0. The servers were bombarded with a simulation of 50,000 customers trying to access each server. Officials claimed the demonstration proved that Windows 2000 is 20% faster than its predecessor.
One of Microsoft's goals for its new operating system is to move up the food chain and sell its new operating system in the more profitable midrange server market currently dominated by Unix flavors from rivals like Sun.
Dell attempted to emphasize Windows 2000's scalability. Cornell University has built the most powerful Windows 2000 system in the world, he said, a $3 million server cluster that is powered by 256 processors and can be used to simulate the failure of airplane parts or analyze complex stock market adjustments.
"We believe no computing job cannot be tackled by open, standards-based computing system," he said.
Dell, in Round Rock, Texas, can be reached at 512-338-4400 or www.dell.com/. Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., can be reached at 425-882-8080 and at www.microsoft.com/.
RELATED LINKS
Network World Fusion.
Dell's Windows 2000 page
Introduces the Windows 2000 Premier Migration Program.
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