SEATTLE – The enterprise server market is evolving – and only through a collaborative effort will the IT industry achieve the goal of cohesive management of servers across the enterprise, Microsoft Corp. said here at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) Monday.
The annual industry conference details Microsoft’s strategy for hardware running its Windows operating systems.
“We want to be more transparent – we have conferences like this to tell you exactly what we’re doing,” said Jim Allchin, platforms vice-president for Microsoft.
Allchin implored developers to take a more “holistic” view of the technical, business and human factors in the product design process. Developers need to focus on improving PC diagnostics and move towards self-configuring and self-tuning systems, Allchin said.
“We’re investing quite a bit of resources to try to work with a set of partners to try to address the virtualization of the storage space. And when we take it from being extremely proprietary and knock it back a little bit so a lot of you can play in areas that the PC industry hasn’t been able to play in. So the result for consumers and the data centre is going to be dramatic,” Allchin said.
Be it high-end 64-bit or rack-mounted, the industry needs to collectively develop the “right sized” server, Allchin said, adding that dense form factors, robustness, interoperability and easy deployment are goals hardware makers should strive for.
“Automation is key to data centre agility…together we need to work on resiliency, security and reliability,” Allchin said. “We’re adding the ability to add memory in Windows .Net server but there’s a lot more to do if we want hot swapping of the CPUs in the other markets.”
Microsoft Windows Server vice-president William Veghte said the .Net enterprise server strategy builds on the Windows 2000 Server family of operating systems and centres around the evolving role of the server and its potential to quickly Web-enable the enterprise, Veghte said.
Microsoft’s investment in the .Net framework, Visual Studio and platform development tools require developer community support to ensure rapid development of new Windows-enabled solutions, Veghte said.
“The relationship where there are many servers participating and working together…that’s where we want to go,” Veghte said.
The industry needs to collaborate on developing technologies (network attached storage and virtual private network appliances, Web blades and ultra-dense servers) that enable more manageable systems and bring appliance-like features (watchdog timers, boot failover) into system design.
WinHEC ends on Thursday with a keynote address from Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates.
WinHEC is at http://microsoft.com/winhec