Summary

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Windows 2000 Server provides the system administrator with a much richer set of disk management tools than any previous version of Windows. The addition of dynamic volumes has materially reduced the number of reboots required to manage disk resources. The administrator can now reconfigure arrays on the fly, adding disks and extending volumes to manage disk space without having to reboot for every change. When combined with hardware RAID controllers and hot-swap drives, these tools finally give the administrator the ability to manage a 24-hour-7-day operation.

The features introduced in the new version of NTFS, including quotas and file system encryption, give the administrator additional flexibility and options to control file system abuse and to protect sensitive data so that even administrators don't have inappropriate access to confidential information. And it is all done in a way that is transparent to the user.

The next chapter looks at clustering, a way to use more than one machine to improve the scalability and fault tolerance of your critical applications and services. Windows 2000 supports three distinct types of clustering—network load balancing, and server clustering.