Application Center Aims to Simplify Web Clusters

Application Center enables companies to increase the performance and availability of multitier Web applications by running them on farms of identical machines. With Application Center’s enhancements to Microsoft’s core clustering technologies, administrators can manage a farm as a single unit. It’s a promising expansion of Microsoft’s platform that could give other application server vendors a run for their money. However, companies evaluating this release should carefully note its limitations, and schedule their deployments with an eye toward major additions to Microsoft’s platform that are coming this year.

Why Application Center Exists

Companies such as barnesandnoble.com and Data Return have been using Windows to host large-scale, multitier Web applications. These applications frequently consist of a presentation tier of dynamic Web pages (Active Server Pages) that present data to the user and process the user’s responses; a business logic tier of COM components that implement the core functions of the application; and a data tier that manages access to databases and other data sources.