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Midrange Systems 6/13 edition had an article which I quote from: Microsoft's bid to challenge IBM in the enterprise serving community guides its Windows NT product squarely into territory currently dominated by Unix and the AS/400. At the Scalability Day event in New York, Microsoft and its major industry partners focused on Windows NT's ability to be all servers to all people. S-Day promoted Microsoft's BackOffice family of server applications as able to manage large enterprise applications such as on-line banking systems, as well as large data warehouses and enterprise mail systems supporting thousands of users. "Any business of any size can now run its enterprise applications on Microsoft software and industry-standard hardware," said Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. "Combining enterprise-class scalability with PC-industry volume economics will radically shape the enterprise market. The ongoing R&D investments made by Microsoft and the industry will provide our customers still greater levels of scalability, interoperability, availability and manageability in the future." However, Gates acknowledged that his company still uses a pair of AS/400s. One industry analyst viewed S-Day as an excellent way for Microsoft to promote its NT product without providing a lot of substance. "[Microsoft] did a good job of [public relations], and a poor job of proving the product," says Tom Bittman, research director at the Gartner Group (Stamford, Conn.). "The two most prominent factors that keep NT from replacing the AS/400 and Unix in the enterprise space are scalability and high availability. And those are the two issues they're attacking." Numbers figured prominently at S-Day, as Microsoft claimed Windows NT has the capability to handle 1 billion transactions per day, or roughly one-fourth of the volume handled by the world's entire banking industry. According to Bittman, Microsoft attempted to back this claim at the event using 20 databases, each handling a portion of the transactions, rather than a single, partitioned relational database. "This just proved that if you really have a need for a large, single and transactional database, you can't do it on a single NT system," he says. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This is the Midrange System Mailing List! To submit a new message, * * send your mail to "MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com". To unsubscribe from * * this list send email to MAJORDOMO@midrange.com and specify * * 'unsubscribe MIDRANGE-L' in the body of your message. Questions * * should be directed to the list owner / operator: david@midrange.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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