News

Dogfood Report: Microsoft IT and MOM 2005

• By Scott Bekker
• 11/18/2004

The Microsoft IT whitepaper provides lessons learned and the scalability and consolidation accomplishments in the deployment, which Microsoft completed Aug. 12. MOM 2005 was released to manufacturing Aug. 25. For the last few years, Microsoft has required its huge, internal IT department to deploy enterprise software in production and sign off on the quality before RTM.

As of August, Microsoft's IT department employed 3,500 people, who manage 300,000 PCs and devices for 92,000 end users and 6,400 production servers. Of those servers, 5,000 are for business applications and 1,400 are for infrastructure. The equipment is spread across 400 supported sites in 83 countries or regions.

In the whitepaper, Microsoft claims increased efficiency in server hardware requirements, IT staff support needs and deployment time for MOM 2005 versus MOM 2000 Service Pack 1.

The move allowed Microsoft IT, which manages 5,600 of its servers with MOM, to reduce the number of MOM servers from 27 to 18. Eventually, Microsoft plans to reduce its MOM server count to 15. On the employee side, Microsoft says it can support the MOM environment with three employees now, down from five employees before.

The focus on out-of-the-box usability in MOM 2005 allowed Microsoft to deploy MOM 2005 in half the time it took to deploy MOM 2000 SP1 and to move further toward a centralized MOM infrastructure, the company's whitepaper says.

The whitepaper is available here.