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In the ongoing quest to make Windows a credible operating system for data centers, Microsoft Corp. yesterday announced a partnership to give a free copy of Aurema Inc.s ARMTech resource management software to Windows 2000 Data Center Server users.
ARMTech, or Active Resource Management Technology, takes over server resources issues between software, users, and processes. Such control is vital for mission-critical implementations. When multiple parties simultaneous request resources, servers traditionally oblige none of them, or grind to a halt trying to oblige them all at once.
“I came to Microsoft a year ago and I did a gap analysis… the gap was really resource management,” said Bob Ellsworth, lead product manager, Windows 2000 Data Center Server. Aurema, of Sydney, Australia, is already well known for supplying ARMTech to Cray Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., he noted.
Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., paid Aurema “less than $1 million” for the technology and will distribute it for free to licensed Windows 2000 Data Center edition users, Ellsworth said.
Looking forward, Microsoft might also add logical and virtual operating system partitioning. But dynamic partitioning, in which processors are allocated to OS instances as needed, “would be wonderful… today you cant do that,” Ellsworth said.
Microsofts goal, he added, is to target Suns Solaris data center market share. A personal goal, he said, is IBMs System 390 mainframe share. “You got it,” Ellsworth said, when asked if thats why Microsoft is giving the tool away for free, as it did with its Internet Explorer Web browser.
The Windows 2000 Data Center Limited Edition, which Microsoft last fall promised would be available in the second half of this year, will “be available very quickly,” Ellsworth said.