MAILBAG - Letter to the Editor

ENT, June 28, 2000

Believe the Hype

"Mission critical" may be hype for office applications, but business reliability is a concern that customers are sensitive to. Windows NT is becoming dominant also in process control applications, which definitely need mission critical reliability. In the process control business, Windows NT has been kept on the periphery of control systems -- operator consoles, etc. -- because it hasn't had the mission critical reliability required to trust it for control of the process. But the interest is there among users and the evolution of process control systems is in that direction.

Our process manufacturing units are expected to have mission critical reliability -- shutdown for maintenance every six years. The system that controls the plant is never expected to shutdown -- which would be my definition of 7x24x365 -- because we never expect to have all the manufacturing units shut down at the same time. Distributed process control systems have done this for the last 20 years, why can't business systems provide the same reliability?

The reason business systems haven't been designed for this level of reliability is because of the cost. Microsoft and others are now trying to create the tools and systems to provide this level of reliability at a lower cost than has been previously possible. At what price point does it pay for a company to standardize on 7x24x365 systems? Reliability has value, even for mail servers.

The hype to be concerned about is when vendors promise 7x24x365 and do not deliver systems and support that really provides 7x24x365.

Steve Griffin

Equistar Chemicals LP

Corpus Christi, Texas

Tastes Worse, Crashes More

I keep seeing comments that Windows 2000 crashes less than NT 4.0. Ive been evaluating it since it was released, and I havent seen that at all. Ive had it crash -- blue screen -- doing installs. It hangs frequently. Best of all, its slow performing any kind of network operation, at least initially, when compared with NT 4.0. Perhaps its just me, or the fact that I upgraded instead of doing a clean install -- though if the product wont perform adequately without a clean install I question its stability. I dont see what the hoopla is about. Its not a bad product particularly, but it's not that great either. Pretty typical MS release so far.

Im running W2K Server and I do a lot of database work. I need the server to be able to install the standard editions of SQL Server 7.0/2000. Im not surprised that my experience isnt typical, I do a lot of weird environments. Im glad to hear that most people get much better results, since there are things about W2K that I really like.

J.R. Densk Jr.

john.densk@idea.com.