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Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The Windows 2000 Datacenter Server OS is aimed at very large organizations with a demanding network load. It’s meant to handle very large databases such as data warehouses, ERP software, and high-volume, real-time, transaction processing such as OLTP (Online Transaction Processing). Compared to other Windows servers, Datacenter has extensive resource-handling capabilities. It can address larger amounts of memory, support more processors, and also offer clustering and network load balancing with higher number of nodes. 

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Resource handling

The Windows 2000 Datacenter Server can support up to 64 GB of physical memory thanks to PAE (Physical Address Extension). No change in application code is required for higher memory use. Instead, Microsoft has provided a new API, called AWE (Address Windowing Extensions). The AWE maps more physical, non-paged memory into an application’s virtual address space. With non-paged memory, applications don’t use the hard drive for caching the data that they process, hence improving performance in the process. 

Datacenter also has SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) support for up to 32 processors to give high scalability. It also offers network load balancing up to 32 nodes, and up to 4-node clustering services for high availability. These give reliable fail-over support. Thus, in case of hardware or software failure on a node, the load is automatically distributed over the remaining nodes and the working of the network is not affected. Users do not normally notice a failure.

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Data transfer on the network

The Datacenter Server also implements what is called Winsock Direct. According to Microsoft, this is an extension of the existing Winsock 2.0. As we know, applications that communicate over the network via TCP/IP, use Winsock (Windows sockets). As claimed, the new Winsock Direct provides lower network latencies, lesser overheads, and hence higher bandwidths and use lesser CPU cycles. In such a case, this will visibly deliver faster I/Os over the network. Hence, data transfer in networks working on SAN (System Area Networks) technology may not have to use TCP/IP at all–if the data source and destination are on the same subnet. 

Process control tool

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The features list is incomplete without describing the new process-management tool–the Process Control tool. This is meant to control resource allocation to applications, based on their priority and works on the Job object–a component that allows processes or groups of processes to be managed. Both CPU time and memory allocated to processes can be defined. This can be used indirectly to control even processes that have gone haywire. In such cases, the process simply exhausts its resources and can’t use resources that are reserved for other processes.

So can you just go out and buy a copy of this server OS for your organization? Well, not really. The Datacenter is offered as a complete solution–in terms of hardware, software, and service. Microsoft has a Datacenter program under which it has tied up with key server manufacturers to offer a complete solution instead of just the OS. Under this model, companies will be able to purchase the OS pre-installed on third-party hardware. Microsoft does some extensive testing of both the hardware and software to ensure that you get optimum results. Only hardware that qualifies on their certified list is allowed to bundle Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. For this, Microsoft directly coordinates with hardware manufacturers to deliver the final solution to you. 

Ashish Sharma

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