News
Application Center 2000 Debuts with Enterprise 2000 Launch
- By Scott Bekker
- 09/25/2000
Microsoft Application Center 2000, a new offering from
Microsoft Corp. as part of its Enterprise 2000 launch, is Microsoft’s first
foray into the Web server farm. It allows Web applications to take advantage of
software scaling in order to grow an enterprise.
Application Center 2000 is a new product; however, part of
the product is grown out of the Component Load Balancing functionality that was
cut from the final release of Windows 2000.
The product manages the middle tier – the application logic
tier – and as such, utilizes Active Directory for management of both the
application and the operating system.
Application Center is supposed to simplify application
server management by combining the principles of distributed processing and
centralized management. Single application images are created for each
Web-based or component-based application that lists the contents, components,
and configuration settings.
Applications can be duplicated from one server to another,
and the product features automatic application synchronization across multiple
servers. Other features include on-demand scalability and cluster wizards for
creating and managing Web clusters.
High availability features include performance and health
monitoring for a single server or group of servers and automated event
detection capabilities to quickly detect and notify if problems arise. – Isaac Slepner
For Microsoft’s overview of Application Center 2000, see www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.