News
Application Center 2000 Beta Now Open to Public
Microsoft releases Application Center 2000 Public Beta 2, which is aimed at IT administrators who need help deploying and managing Web servers and mid-tier application servers.
As reported by Editor-in-Chief Scott Bekker of
ENT Magazine, Microsoft Corp. has released what it calls "Public Beta 2" of its Application Center 2000. The application management suite is aimed at IT administrators who need help deploying and managing Web servers and mid-tier application servers.
Microsoft made Application Center 2000 Public Beta 1 available to about 300 users; that Microsoft has made Public Beta 2 available to anyone through its Web site shows that the company is confident in the strides its developers have made since offering a glimpse of the product last February. Microsoft will also offer it in CD form later this summer to attendees of its Professional Developer Conference in Orlando, Florida.
Besides deployment, management, monitoring, and diagnostic tools, Application Center 2000 includes a feature called Network Load Balancing, previously known as Windows Load Balancing Service in Windows NT 4.0. NLB is the technology in Win2K Advanced Server and Win2K Datacenter Server that spreads Internet client requests across up to 32 servers.
Also new is Component Load Balancing, originally a feature of Windows 2000 COM+ that was pulled out of Windows 2000; CLB provides object-level load balancing, allowing different application servers to tackle different chunks of an application for better performance.
Microsoft expects Application Center 2000 to be available in the fourth quarter 2000. The product will follow Microsoft’s new per-processing licensing model, and is expected to be priced at $2,999 per processor.
To read the full report on Application Center 2000 from ENT Magazine, go to http://www.entmag.com/breaknews.asp?ID=3085. Microsoft's Application Center 2000 page is at http://www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter.