What Are the Benefits of Windows 2000?

Windows 2000 is Microsoft s most scalable enterprise operating system yet released and is currently the best platform for hosting applications migrated from a UNIX environment. A significant advance over Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides a stable, scaleable, reliable, and secure operating system that can run the largest corporate data centers.

Scalability

Windows 2000 encompasses both horizontal and vertical scalability, meaning it can scale both in terms of the number of users that it can contain within its directory and in the number of simultaneous connections it can host. With Windows 2000, you can both scale up (by adding more processors or faster hardware) and scale out (by adding multiple computers to increase overall capacity and using clustering technologies where appropriate). This dual scalability allows Windows 2000 to match or exceed UNIX performance levels at significantly lower costs.

Microsoft Active Directory directory service removes the 40,000 user account per domain restrictions of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, and gives you the ability to scale to deployments well in excess of 1,000,000 user accounts. Laboratory testing of Active Directory has demonstrated the capacity to cope with a single forest incorporating up to 10,000,000 objects. Therefore, Windows 2000 can manage the user accounts of the largest organizations.

Active Directory provides logon scalability by letting you add more domain controllers. Multi-master replication keeps all the domain controllers synchronized, ensuring that all servers within a domain maintain an up-to-date copy of the directory database. Whether your organization is centralized or distributed, Windows 2000 can provide you with fast and secure logon facilities.

Reliability

Windows 2000 provides several features that enhance reliability, making it suitable for the hosting environment or mission critical, nonstop computing.

Multi-master replication means that all servers within a domain maintain a full writeable copy of the directory database. This, in turn , means that there is no dependency on a primary domain controller and no requirement for manual promotion of a backup domain controller if the primary fails.

Note  

There are still operations masters such as the Schema master that need to be given a higher level of attention. However, if an operations master does fail, well documented procedures exist for taking control of an operations master function.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter Server let you create either two-node (Advanced Server) or up to four-node (Datacenter Server) clusters. Clustering technology allows you to reboot nodes in the cluster while still providing services to the network.

Windows 2000 Network Load Balancing provides enhanced reliability, typically in the Web and business logic tiers. If a front-end server fails, the user s session will automatically route to another available computer. For the greatest reliability, you can use multiple Network Load Balancing clusters, and then load-balance client requests across the two clusters simply by using DNS round robin .

Component Load Balancing is a feature of Microsoft Application Center 2000 and enables you to create load-balancing clusters within your business logic tier .

Security

Windows 2000 is designed with security as a primary goal. From the isolation of the logon sequence from other processes to the granularity of control that can be applied by means of NTFS and Active Directory permissions and group policy, Windows 2000 provides a firm framework for implementing hosted applications.

Additionally, Windows 2000 security templates allow you to apply security settings easily in order to set different levels of protection to your domain controllers or member servers.

Manageability

Windows 2000 has a number of administrative interfaces that enable administrators and developers to monitor and manage the operating system. Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provides a series of event monitors that can be used to provide real-time information about the health of a Windows 2000 computer. Microsoft Management Console (MMC) provides a framework for customizable tools that you can use to carry out a range of administrative tasks .