Windows 2000 Powers Web Server Appliances

IBM and Dell have announced compact Windows 2000 servers optimized for serving Web pages. Designed for rapid deployment in data centers, the new rack-mounted servers are less than two inches high and offer Internet service providers, Web hosting services, and application service providers substantial functionality in an inexpensive box. The stripped-down version of Windows 2000 included with these appliances is not, officially, Windows 2000 Embedded, but may bear a close resemblance to that product, which is still in development. Web server appliances are critical to Microsoft’s future in the Web hosting market, where Linux poses its most serious threat to the company.

What’s in a Web Server Appliance

The main Windows 2000 services included with the Dell and IBM Web server appliances are Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, Network Load Balancing (NLB), and Windows 2000 setup features that will make the appliances easy to deploy and manage.

The inclusion of NLB is notable because this service is normally found only in Windows 2000 Advanced Server, whose list price starts at nearly US$4,000. NLB allows a Web site to configure up to 32 Web servers in a cluster that appears to the outside world as a single server, so the failure of one or even several servers will not bring down the site. This feature will be particularly valuable to large Web hosting firms that are the most likely customers for Web server appliances. Windows 2000 Web server appliances offer substantial savings for these companies because they get the hardware and an operating system for only a modest premium over the cost of comparable hardware alone. Dell’s PowerApp.web appliance, including the hardware, the operating system (OS), and NLB, costs less than a single copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server, for example: US$2,798 for the entire system, compared with US$3,999 for the server software alone.