Microsoft Corp. last week added to the foundation of its enterprise software array with the release to manufacturing of Application Center, the last of the 2000 generation of its .Net server family. Application Center 2000, available next month, aims to help users configure, manage, monitor and load-balance Web applications built on the Windows 2000 operating system.
Companies face many choices when they build Web sites.
With the latter approach, companies are sometimes left with a management challenge, because systems administrators typically have to tend to each server in a cluster separately unless they have created or bought special tools. Application Center was designed to address that problem, enabling a company to manage a cluster of up to 12 servers as a single entity, said Microsoft technical product manager Bob Pulliam. Firms with more servers can use a staging server to deploy applications to each of the clusters, he said. I can't share the road map, but it's pretty impressive. Microsoft is investing in this product.