News

Datacenter Server App Testing Begins: Expect a Tiny Fraction of Apps to Clear This High Bar

• By Scott Bekker
• 09/27/2000

Lionbridge Technologies Inc. this week began certification testing at its Los Angeles VeriTest lab of applications for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, the final member of the Windows 2000 family of operating systems.

Datacenter Server, launched by Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday, is designed for high-end, enterprise use and will compete with Unix/RISC systems. To ensure rock-solid reliability, Microsoft is making end users buy the OS preconfigured on a complete system directly from a handful of hardware vendors who have run the configuration through a 14-day stress test and will support the whole system 24x7.

Applications certified to run on Datacenter Server will face challenges no less daunting than the hardware OEMs face.

VeriTest will check that the applications operate correctly on a 32-processor system. The certification candidate application must support Job Objects when placed under Datacenter Server’s new process control tool, which allows administrators to assign certain jobs to specific processors.

The application must also play well in a four-node failover cluster environment and meet all the provisions of the Server Application Specification for Windows 2000. The ISV must also furnish 24x7 support for the software.

Not all applications that run on Datacenter Server will need to be certified, although the demand for the Windows 2000 certification logo could be higher in glasshouse environments than elsewhere in the enterprise.

The Windows 2000 logo program has seen limited participation thus far. Certification signifies a lot more with Windows 2000 than it did with the old Designed for BackOffice logos, but it’s also harder to achieve.

While thousand of applications run on Windows 2000, about 118 applications have earned Certified for Windows 2000 logos in the seven months since the Windows 2000 launch. More than two-thirds of those are certified for Windows 2000 Professional.

For Windows 2000 Server, only 42 applications have gained certification. Jump up the scale to Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and the number of certified applications drops to six, or about 5 percent of the total number of certified applications.

Presumably Datacenter Server certified applications will represent a percentage of the Advanced Server applications.

VeriTest, which has the exclusive license to conduct application certification testing for Microsoft, will conduct Datacenter Server tests on 32-processor hardware from Unisys and eight-processor servers from Compaq for the next 12 months.

Lionbridge will open Datacenter Server testing in its VeriTest labs in Paris and Ireland in the fourth quarter of this year and in Tokyo in the first quarter of 2001.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has completed Certified for Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server logo testing for two of the enterprise servers it launched this week, SQL Server 2000 and Exchange 2000 Server. – Scott Bekker