Microsoft Expands Clustering Capabilities Of Windows Nt Server 4.0

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Jan 25, 1998

Announces Immediate Availability of Windows NT Load Balancing Service

Microsoft Corp. has announced immediate availability of the Windows NT Load Balancing Service (WLBS), which expands and enhances the scalability and reliability of TCP/IP-based network services and applications hosted on the Windows NT Server operating system version 4.0 Enterprise Edition.

Microsoft says the Windows NT Load Balancing Service provides the infrastructure to meet customer requirements in high-volume, mission-critical electronic commerce sites, corporate intranet server farms, streaming media services, virtual private networks (VPNs), and Internet service providers (ISPs).

"Customers are using Windows NT clustering services today to increase the reliability of their internal applications, system services and databases," according to Edmund Muth, group product manager at Microsoft. "With the new load-balancing features, we are extending clustering to Web-centric applications and providing the technology to achieve superior reliability and price performance."

WLBS allows customers to cluster their TCP/IP-based network services across up to 32 systems, which then appear as a single logical TCP/IP address space. Muth says the fully distributed design of the load-balancing algorithm of WLBS enables administrators to provide reliable services in the face of system maintenance, server upgrades and unplanned downtime.

WLBS "significantly improves throughput and availability of a wide range of services," says Microsoft, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Windows streaming media services, VPN solutions, Microsoft Proxy Server and others. WLBS complements the Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), which is also part of Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition.

"Since we deployed this TCP/IP load-balancing technology, we have been extremely pleased with the increase in performance and reliability we have seen in our busiest Web sites, especially www.multex.com and www.multexinvestor.com," says early user Alex Berlin, vice president of technology at Multex Systems. "Microsoft customers will benefit from the enhancement and integration of the Windows NT Load Balancing Service into the platform."

Rights to use the component are included in new Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition licenses. Existing Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition customers are also entitled to the upgrade free of charge; they can download it as a system component from http://www.microsoft.com/ntserverenterprise. n