Aberdeen Comes Around on NT - Windows NT, 2000 - Software Review - Evaluation

ENT, Jan 12, 2000

A new study of Windows NT and Windows 2000 by the Aberdeen Group (www.aberdeen.com) reverses the analyst firm's two-plus-year position that the Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) platform reaches its enterprise limits at the workgroup operating environment level.

"Windows NT version 4.0 is capable of being successfully deployed in enterprise, mission-critical computing environments under certain conditions," concludes Joe Clabby, group vice president, platforms and professional services, in Aberdeen's 85-page report, "Is Windows NT/Windows 2000 Enterprise-Ready?"

"Aberdeen believes that the forthcoming revision of NT -- Windows 2000 -- will serve to further prove the case that Windows NT and its derivatives can be used as a reliable, secure, scalable, manageable enterprise-class operating environment," Clabby writes.

Aberdeen based the report on interviews with IS managers, IT executives, independent software vendors, and OEMs. "This research changed our minds about NT," Clabby says.

The firm's formerly dour attitude toward NT stemmed from problems such as memory leaks, application conflicts, directory issues with Microsoft's Domain Name Server, scalability limits, security vulnerabilities, interoperability problems, and difficulties with managing systems, desktops, and storage.

Noticing that several companies successfully deploy Windows NT 4.0 in mission-critical environments while other users experience frequent crashes, Aberdeen was determined to ferret out the factors that are common to successful deployments.

The analysts found that applications must be structured properly to minimize conflicts with the operating system; the system requires extensions or third-party tools for system management, scalability, availability, and interoperability; and enterprise-grade procedures and disciplines need to be applied to ensure continuous operation.

Developments that Aberdeen believes are changing Windows NT/Windows 2000's place in the enterprise include the emergence of performance clustering, eight-way Intel servers, and switch-oriented system designs as opposed to bus-oriented system designs.

Manageability improvements in Windows 2000 -- including Windows Management Instrumentation and IntelliMirror -- will make Windows 2000 enterprise-class for homogeneous Microsoft environments, Aberdeen finds. Active Directory gives Microsoft an enterprise-capable directory environment and improves the platform's interoperability, according to the group.

Third-party tools are still required for heterogeneous system management and enterprise-class security, Clabby writes.

Despite the more positive stance, Aberdeen analysts also say Microsoft and its OEM partners have many areas to improve upon before Windows NT and Windows 2000 can compete more favorably with IBM's OS/390 and OS/400 and some Unix flavors.

Microsoft must enhance transaction processing to include transactional roll-back; make the operating system recover more elegantly; develop static and dynamic partitioning beyond what Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) is doing with cellular multiprocessing; and place greater emphasis on cross-platform application development.