Transcript BREAKING GLASS Reflections on Windows 2000 "Almost 60% surveyed plan to install Windows 2000 ...

BREAKING GLASS Reflections on Windows 2000
"Almost 60% surveyed plan to install Windows 2000 ... eventually”
"It's 2001. Have you started your Windows 2000 migration?"
Wait for Whistler , “whistle while you work”
"Delphi dumps W2k, downgrades to NT4"
"No rush to open Windows 2000"
“Windows 2000 Professional is Microsoft's most reliable desktop
operating system to date”
“Upgrading to Windows 2000 is very simple”
THE FUTURE
TOMORROW
Wholescale Interaction
NOW
95
98
Desktop
Business Readiness
2000
Business
Process
.NET
Connected
Society
Windows 2000 at Holmes Place
Ian Takats
Group IS Manager
Background
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Over 60 Clubs in UK and Europe
47 clubs in the UK, 13 in Europe
2000+ employees
Over 170,000 members
Growing at rate of 13 new clubs a year
Turnover y/e 1999 - £61.4m (+65.3%) year
Old Infrastructure/Systems
• Each club and Head office environment runs on
NT 4.0 server + Windows 98 on workstations
• E-mail connectivity provided with multiple subdomains at each of our locations using c-mail from
Computalynx e.g.
– Kensington.hphc.co.uk
– Ealing.hphc.co.uk
• System requires very high level of support
The Move to 2000
Considerations
What the Adverts say
• Performance – TPC results state that Windows
2000 can perform over twice as many transactions
per cycle than nearest rival. At 50% of the cost*
• Faster
– Windows 95 - 39% faster, Windows 98- 30% faster
• Scalable – Windows comes in more than one
flavour! 2000 Server, Advanced Server,
Datacenter server. Can cluster up to 32 servers.
• More Stable and Reliable
• More secure - improved systems security
• Better Manageability including support for selfhealing applications
Windows 2000 – Why didn’t we
move earlier?
• Fear and doubt
• Key concern - Membership System
wasn’t Y2k compliant
• Membership system not certified to work
with Windows 2000 – Still isn’t
• £££££’s !!! No Budget
• Joined Holmes Place in October 1999
Your reasons for not moving?
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Y2K
Upgrades too frequent
Budget constraints
Windows 98 – didn’t seem to make any great
progress and possibly detracted from people’s
perception of Windows 2000
• Device drivers possibly not available
• Time and Resource
Why we moved to 2000?
• Because we can! – ability to trial
• Exchange 2000 project - Exchange Server 2000
needs 2000 server
• Reliability/Stability - In a study of server reboots, MS
found 21% of unplanned outages were due to system
failures, <50% due to device drivers, Anti-virus soft
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More laptops being used
Building for the future – Manageability
Cybercafe in Vienna – needed reliability
More control of desktops at clubs – user
destruction syndrome!
Kensington
Laptop
User
Internet
512kb link
512kb link
Barbican
Club
What about Active Directories?
• First thing everyone asks…research carried out by
suggests many smaller organisations are not really
using Active Directories - Aberdeen
• Holmes Place are using Active Directories at a
basic level :– Countries
– Departments
– Clubs
• Active directories are not needed for many
services such as file and print
What We Found
• Server - Very stable - No unscheduled downtime
since installation
• Windows 2000 professional – very stable
compared with 98
• 2000 professional better than NT4.0 workstation
when moving between sites and logging on to
different networks - Recognises all printers and
servers etc. Synchronisation of files for laptops is
excellent
• Easy to use – administration features are excellent
– especially the MMC (Vienna) and Active
Directories functionality
What we found – continued
• Windows 2000 professional - Plug & Play is
much better. Good resources are :– ZDNet Windows 2000 Resource Centre
– Windrivers.com
• Fast…unless root drive hasn’t enough space!
• Less need to reboot when installing new software
• Partition on root directory – make sure you leave a
lot of disk space and don’t install
programs on it!
So why haven’t more people moved to
Windows 2000?
• Y2k
• Too soon after Windows 98 – hard to justify
another upgrade
• Windows 98 wasn’t such a big upgrade and
led to scepticism over the need to move to
Windows 2000 even if using NT 4.0
• Budget constraints
What it’s missing
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Better Event Logging
Ability to roll-back functional changes
64-bit Addressing
An enterprise all-in-one box server
A little effort… a great result!