Seven Bad Reasons to Bar Windows from the Enterprise
- By Scott Bekker
- 10/20/2003
Getting Windows servers into the enterprise data center has been a major goal of Microsoft's for years. It's been three years since Microsoft launched Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. It's been six years since Microsoft launched Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition. Some of you may even remember Redmond's infamous Scalability Day all those years ago. And still, Microsoft does not have a solid presence in the glass house.
There are many reasons.
There are the large, political concerns in the category of think globally, act locally. There's the argument that having the entire global infrastructure built on Microsoft software is a bad idea for security overall. It's not so much a knock on Microsoft directly as just an argument that standardization on one operating system, any operating system, is an insecure idea. While most organizations have given up resistance on the desktop, the server side is still an area where IT has some control over the diversity of its infrastructure. Then there's the argument that some organizations have ethical problems with the Microsoft business practices that have led to monopoly in the client OS market, and it's every shop's duty to make sure that in some small way Microsoft doesn't benefit from that monopoly by taking all the money in the server market, too. Then there's always the basic distrust of Microsoft in general, and an unwillingness to let Microsoft software seep into every pore of the enterprise.
Another category consists of religious arguments. That real administrators don't use GUIs. Or that Windows is an offensively and unnecessarily complex operating system -- a complexity driven by Microsoft's marketing-driven desire to make the OS all things to all customers.
The practical reasons that Windows isn't ubiquitous in the enterprise data center are probably the most significant, though. IT survives, after all, in a culture dominated by dollar signs. The most important practical reason is that IT has been burned by the scalability limitations and the reliability and availability nightmares of Windows NT 4.0. And IT can have a long memory.
But that's where this special report comes in. There are a lot of truisms floating around about Windows that were mostly true when Windows NT 4.0 was Microsoft's server operating system. A lot of those technical, practical problems have been eliminated, lessened or made irrelevant.
There are still a lot of good reasons not to let Windows into your data center. But there are bad reasons to keep Windows out. Here we'll look at the seven worst reasons to keep Windows out of the enterprise.
Click here to see the first bad reason to keep Windows out of the enterprise.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.