The Four Hundred

With approximately 75 percent of OS/400 shops having Windows servers of some sort running at their sites, the launch of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, on April 24, will have almost as much effect on these companies as a launch of a new release of OS/400. Windows Server 2003, the follow-on product to Windows 2000, developed under the code name "Whistler," is supposed to be a more reliable and secure product. So what are IBM's plans for Windows Server 2003 on the iSeries?

First, you should probably know a little more about Windows Server 2003. Whistler has plenty of technical advancements that are going to make it an attractive upgrade from the Windows 2000 editions for servers. And because Microsoft wants to get lots of hesitant customers to spend money in a down economy, Whistler will have something else: prices that match Windows 2000.

Traditionally, as any company rolls out a much more advanced version of its operating system platform, the provider of that platform raises prices. The company does this for a number of reasons. First, it wants to recoup some of the substantial investments it has made in creating more advanced server software. Creating more reliable and scalable operating systems with more features than prior releases is hard enough, but new releases and versions also are coming out with increasing frequency. That means that operating system providers have to recoup larger costs in shorter timeframes. Luckily (sort of) the pace of change has slowed down a bit in the past two years, now that the dot-com bubble has burst, and the pressure on operating system providers is not so great when it comes to new features, but in making what they have work better. That doesn't mean that operating system providers are not adding new features these days; they surely are. But it is increasingly difficult to get users to pay for them, because they don't just want to keep upgrading their machines all the time. They want to build systems, use them for a couple of years, and leave them alone. This is another reason why, as Microsoft did in the jump from Windows NT to Windows 2000, operating system providers have tended to raise prices: As they announce each successor to an operating system, an ever-smaller portion of their installed base tends to move forward. If your Windows NT 4.0 file server is working, you don't mess with it, even if Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 are available. Those who do move have to pay the price of all that development, and there are fewer of them, so the price hikes could be substantial.

Knowing all of this, and the threat that open-source Linux platforms are to Windows hegemony at small and midsized businesses, Microsoft has done something that makes perfect sense: It has locked prices on Windows 2003 to essentially the same levels as Windows 2000. There is a new low-cost edition of Windows 2003 aimed at Linux, which is different, and Microsoft has changed some of the licensing terms for the software with the Whistler release, so pricing is not exactly the same, except for the base operating system for each server.

Microsoft has not yet released pricing for upgrades from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003, however. If Microsoft prices these upgrades too high, it may drive customers either to Linux, to staying put and not buying anything, or to acquiring new servers running Windows 2003 only in cases where Windows 2003 is necessary. We're on the prowl for upgrade prices, but no luck so far.

In any event, the entry Whistler product is Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, and this is the so-called Linux killer. This is a base version of the operating system that does not require customers to buy Client Access Licenses (CALs). Remember, Microsoft's Client Access License is not the same thing as IBM's Client Access program for linking Windows machines to the OS/400 platform. The Web edition runs only on 32-bit Intel processors and supports only two-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and up to 2 GB of main memory. This Web edition will have an estimated retail street price of $399, but it could be lower depending on what Microsoft's resellers do. (The pricing information Microsoft is giving out is suggested retail pricing.) Microsoft cautions that this product will not be available from all resellers or through all channels, but it does not say who will get to sell it and on what devices. This has undoubtedly irked some of Microsoft's partners, although it is hard to say which ones without knowing Microsoft's plan.

Windows 2003 Standard Edition is the base version of Whistler that can support the full breadth of 32-bit applications and databases available in the Windows world. It will support four-way SMP servers and up to 4 GB of main memory. Microsoft is suggesting a retail price of $999 per server including five CALs and $1,199 including 10 CALs. This edition only supports 32-bit Intel iron, just like the Web edition.

Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition supports both 32-bit Pentium and 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel, with SMP support scaling up to eight processors, like the current Advanced Server edition of Windows 2000. The 64-bit Itanium variant of Windows 2000 will support up to 64 GB of main memory, while the 32-bit version tops out at 32 GB of main memory. The suggested retail price of the Enterprise Edition is $3,999 including a base 25 CALs.

Microsoft is not providing pricing information on the Datacenter Edition of Windows Server 2003, much as it did not for the prior Windows 2000 version of its high-end operating system. The company argues that it has "bundled" Datacenter Edition with the hardware, but this is hogwash, since Microsoft doesn't own a hardware platform on which to bundle the operating system. Microsoft just doesn't want to publish pricing for Datacenter Edition, and the Transaction Processing Performance Council has looked the other way and allowed it to do benchmarks on the code without providing pricing. What is now known about Whistler Datacenter Edition--which has been keenly awaited because Windows 2000 does not scale as well as Whistler--is that this variant of Microsoft's high-end operating system will support up to 32- or 64-way SMP scalability, with the 32-bit version supporting up to 64 GB of main memory and the 64-bit version supporting up to 512 GB of main memory. A 64-way machine with 512 GB of main memory is a behemoth, and it is what Hewlett-Packard expects to start shipping around the time the Intel "Madison" Itanium 2 chips are ready this summer.

CAL pricing is a little bit different this time around. In the past, every device (except a special generic Internet connector for Web users) that linked into Windows 2000 had to have its own CAL. Now a CAL can be used for each unique device or--and here's the new twist--for a unique person who might have multiple devices they use to access Windows networks and applications (but presumably not simultaneously). Microsoft is also charging one price for a base CAL, and then another (and much higher) price for users or devices that need to link through Terminal Services. An incremental five-pack CAL for Windows Server 2003 costs $199 and a 20-pack costs $799. A five-pack CAL including Terminal Services costs $749, with a 20-pack costing $2,669.

On March 28, Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 to manufacturing, which is Microsoftese for locking down the code and sending it off to be spun into CDs for final distribution. This also is what Microsoft often called the gold code implementation of a program. Microsoft says 550,000 companies participated in the Whistler beta program, the highest number for any Windows release. The company has also said that it has prepared over 70,000 partners for the Windows Server 2003 launch. Both Microsoft and those partners are counting on the lower total cost of ownership and higher security, reliability, and scalability of the new software to make Windows shops enthusiastic about upgrading their operating systems (and maybe even their hardware) despite the uncertain economic situation. We'll see if these arguments fall on deaf ears as we get into the summer.

Like all operating system suppliers, Microsoft does not seem to be targeting Windows 2000 shops with its rhetoric, as it is the stalwart Windows NT 4.0 shops that have avoided making the jump to Windows 2000. This is the case with every new hardware/operating system release. At the beginning of a new technology, like Windows NT 4 in the late 1990s, nearly all companies will adopt it and its subsequent releases. They go for the new releases because of the problems in the earlier releases, and when they reach a point where the software works, they stop messing with it and stop upgrading. Approximately one third of the installed Windows servers out there are still running Windows NT, and plenty of the remaining companies using Windows are happy with their Windows 2000 machines and their old Licensing 5.0 pricing, which is cheaper than the Licensing 6.0 pricing Microsoft kicked in last summer. Getting these companies to do anything is going to take a Herculean effort. Luckily, Microsoft has $40 billion in cash in the bank--more than one year's worth of revenue--and that means it has the immensity commensurate for the job.

The company's statements last week give a taste of the kind of marketing we will hear again and again over the next year. Microsoft claims that Windows Server 2003 platforms are 100 times more scalable than the original Windows NT 4.0 platforms announced in 1996, and that transactions processed on them are one-tenth of the cost. Well, yes, but any company that bought a server in 1996 and a Windows NT 4.0 license has long since paid for that system, and the cost of that machine is nil, despite the impressive price/performance improvements in the Windows platform over the past nine years. Anyway, Microsoft says that Windows Server 2003 will allow companies to deploy 20 to 30 percent fewer servers, to run workloads twice as fast, to reduce server management costs by 20 percent, and to reduce the number of IT staff dedicated to Windows servers by 35 percent, and to cut deployment costs by 50 percent compared to Windows NT 4.0.

Microsoft also released the 64-bit version of its SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition to manufacturing last Friday. This version of the Microsoft relational database has been created to run on the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors. Microsoft has similarly released a 64-bit version of its Windows XP environment for Itanium 2 workstations, which will also be launched on April 24.

Microsoft says that Windows Server 2003 has been the major beneficiary of its $200 million Trustworthy Computing effort to shore up the security of Microsoft's products. This was one of the main delays in bringing the Whistler server to market, which has been delayed three times in two years. It is coming to market approximately nine months late; Microsoft originally promised to ship it in the second half of 2001. Windows Server 2003 is the result of three years of coding by some 5,000 Microsoft software engineers.

According to George Gaylord, marketing manager of Windows integration for the iSeries, the company had already tweaked OS/400 V5R2 and its Integration for Windows Server component so it could support the Release Candidate 2 (RC2), and certified it for use on the iSeries running OS/400 V5R2. Like everyone else, IBM was actually ready to support Whistler late last year, in this case on the Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) co-processors and on external xSeries servers that link to the iSeries through the Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA) cards. IBM plans to support Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition on the IxS and IxA cards. At this point, IBM is evaluating the entry Web Edition of Whistler, but Gaylord says there are no plans to deliver it on the IxS or IxA-attached xSeries servers. This may seem odd, given that many OS/400 shops use Windows for their Web infrastructure, but they also use Windows for application, print, and file serving, which the Web Edition is not suited for. Similarly, IBM does not apparently plan to support Whistler Datacenter Edition on externally attached xSeries servers. IBM's own xSeries 440 servers span from 4 to 16 processors and certainly are capable of running the Datacenter Edition; to span beyond eight processors in a single-system image or to address over 32 GB of main memory, Datacenter Edition is required, in fact. IBM is evaluating whether Windows 2003 will be supported on OS/400 V5R1. So if you want Whistler and you are on V5R1 or earlier releases of OS/400, you might have to upgrade your AS/400 or iSeries server so you can upgrade your Windows environment.

The support of Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition on the IxS and IxA-attached servers is consistent with the way IBM has supported Windows 2000. IBM currently supports Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server on the IxS coprocessors based on the 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon DP (features 2792 and 2892). With the Advanced Server support, IxS cards can be mirrored for high-availability failover under the skins of the iSeries using Microsoft's "Wolfpack" Cluster Services. (This is a very useful feature.) IBM also supports either Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server on IxA-attached xSeries machines, specifically the xSeries 235 (a two-way supporting Xeon DP chips running as high as 2.8 GHz), the xSeries 255 (a four-way supporting the 2 GHz Xeon MP processors), the xSeries 360 (a more dense four-way Xeon MP machine), and the xSeries 440 mentioned above, which supports up to 16 2 GHz Xeon MPs and up to 64 GB of main memory. Windows 2000 Advanced Server can only run on four-way and eight-way versions of this machine unless companies implement virtual machine partitioning. IBM pushes VMware's ESX Server for exactly this purpose. IBM is not supporting Windows 2000 Datacenter Server on the xSeries 440 when attached to the iSeries--and likely will not support the Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition on the machine, either--because that operating system is designed to support the big relational databases that rightfully belong on the iSeries in any OS/400 shop. However, Gaylord says that if a customer approached the iSeries organization and said it wanted to implement Datacenter Edition on an xSeries 440 hooked to the iSeries via the IxA card, IBM would entertain that idea and possibly implement it.

The IxS cards based on the 1 GHz Pentium III (features 2799 and 2899) and 850 MHz Pentium III (features 2791 and 2891) processors support Windows NT 4.0 as well as Windows 2000 Server. I think it is highly unlikely that these IxS coprocessors will be enabled to support Windows 2003 Server. The old 333 MHz Pentium II Integrated Netfinity Server (features 6618 and 2865) ran Windows NT as well as IBM's OS/2 Warp and Novell's NetWare; they won't be getting Windows 2003 support, either.

As has been the case in past generations, IBM will debut a new IxS card at some point--maybe even the week that Whistler is announced--that has a faster processor and only support for Whistler, rather than both Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. But given that a lot of companies won't be moving to Whistler any time soon, it will probably be another IxS card announced even further in the future--maybe in 2004--that gets only Windows 2003 Server support.

IBM had already certified the RC2 release of Windows 2003 Server for use on the IxS and IxA-attached servers last year. But when Microsoft rolled out the gold code version of the product at the end of March, Big Blue needed to go back and recertify the final version, according to sources at IBM. IBM is in the process of doing this right now, and it is unclear if IBM will have this done when Microsoft starts shipping Windows Server 2003 on April 24. IBM obviously is working toward that goal, but a lot depends on the last-minute changes Microsoft made to the operating system. One thing is for sure: IBM won't support Whistler until it is ready for primetime on the iSeries, and as soon as it is certified to be, you'll be able to get your hands on it.