NT practises its scales

Users should remain cautious about deployment of Microsoft?s Windows NT because while the operating system is slowly becoming more scalable, it is certainly not there yet.

This was one of the key messages to emerge from the GartnerGroup?s fifth annual Enterprise Systems conference in Chicago this week, where analysts also warned that any solution based on throwing more NT boxes at a problem simply resulted in a management nightmare.

Erik Keller, Gartner?s research director, explained: ?There?s a fad at the moment about how NT is going to solve everyone?s problems and while it can handle most jobs, it?s at the expense of complexity. The hundred or so application servers necessary to scale are difficult to manage and to make a scalable server, users need to start playing about with source code, which brings its own problems.?

Paul McGuckin, also a Gartner research director, said that one of the reasons behind the NT push was the unprecedented level of independent software vendors? enthusiasm for the platform ? a fact that was important when making a system choice, but one that also needed to be considered in the light of other, maybe overriding, criteria.

?SAP, for example, is pushing users to go for NT implementations, but if customers are looking at an installation with 1,500 or more users then they?re definitely going to head for trouble. Long-term, I?m worried about SAP?s support for other platforms. SAP is pushing away from other operating systems and in future, you?ll only find support for a handful, and the rest won?t even be on the shortlist,? he said.

But, he added, there was no conspiracy between the two vendors.

?Software vendors are sick of porting to different flavours of Unix and SAP sees NT?s potential,? he said. However, he warned that NT?s scalability lagged well behind other operating systems and would continue to do so over the next five years.

As a result, he said, NT was still used mainly in smaller shops and by those who resisted moving to Unix for their core mission-critical applications. Into the future, it would become the migration path of least resistance for AS/400 users as the platform dwindled, but by 2000, some 50 per cent of users would use it as an alternative to other platforms for back office applications.

In data warehousing, John Radcliffe, Gartner?s research analyst, said that while NT had so far been used mostly for smaller datamarts rather than enterprise-wide, Microsoft had done a lot of work on the forthcoming version 7.0 of its SQL server database, to push it into the higher and lower end data warehousing market.

But he added: ?SQL Server is way behind the other relational databases, and it will take several years to catch up, particularly in harnessing NT clusters.?