IntelliMirror. Many UNIX companies have spent a lot of time criticizing NT because of the amount of work it takes to administer a large NT network. Those companies have a point; in fact, the only way to get a truly zero administration PC is to take out the power supply. This situation will change when enterprises roll out NT Server 5.0 and NT Workstation 5.0, both of which will support the client and server portions of a technology called IntelliMirror, an important component in Microsoft's Zero Administration for Windows (ZAW) initiative. IntelliMirror will automatically mirror data, applications, and settings from a PC back to a central server. IntelliMirror will increase user mobility by enabling users to sit down in front of any PC on their network and easily access their data and applications. IntelliMirror will simplify PC replaceability by mirroring all of a user's data, applications, and customized settings from the server, which means replacing a PC will be as simple as plugging in a new PC with NT 5.0 installed. To learn more about ZAW and IntelliMirror, see Mark Minasi, "Zero Administration for Windows," December 1997.
Media management services. NT servers support more disk space every year, which makes solving the problem of availability particularly important. Today, you must reboot an NT server after adding a disk or changing the layout of partitions. As NT becomes a crucial part of a network, such rebooting becomes problematic. The new media management services in NT 5.0 will let administrators add and rearrange disk space as well as expand file systems without a reboot. Screen 1 shows the new Disk Management utility on the MMC in NT 5.0 beta 1. Some features of NT 5.0 media management services include improved handling of removable media such as ZIP drives and dynamic resizing of file systems. Currently, you can format removable media devices only as FAT. This limitation is not a problem with a ZIP drive but can be serious for a device such as a Jaz drive supporting 2GB of storage.
NT directory services. Perhaps the biggest change coming in NT Server 5.0 is AD. Currently, various logical objects in NT, such as users, storage, and applications, share no unified naming convention. For example, users exist either in a local or a domainwide structure, file shares are named for the machine they exist on, and applications have no naming convention. Currently, NT layers these varying addressing constructs on either Domain Name System (DNS) or Microsoft's NetBEUI. The resulting multilayered and noninteroperable structure complicates managing very large NT networks.
AD will simplify this picture, imposing a unified naming convention based on the International Standards Organization (ISO) X.500 standard on all objects on the network. AD will also build lookup operations on top of a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service. LDAP is an increasingly common network standard that most vendors support. With AD, you'll be able to move or duplicate resources without affecting users. You can read an excellent white paper discussing the fundamentals of AD at http://www.microsoft.com. To learn how AD will change the way NT functions, see Mark Minasi's series of Inside Out columns spotlighting AD, November and December 1997, and January and February 1998.
MMC. Just as existing versions of NT have no common naming convention, NT has no common interface for administrative tasks. In NT 5.0, you will perform all administrative tasks through the MMC, which Screen 2 shows. If you've been using Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0, you've already seen the early version of MMC that manages IIS. MMC is built around a plug-in architecture based on ActiveX. This structure has two major advantages. First, any vendor can add a proprietary plug-in to control its application. Second, backup and database applications will quickly adopt MMC as their administrative interface. Because MMC is built on the foundations of ActiveX, extending the interface to work over the Web is possible, although Microsoft does not guarantee that all MMC objects will be Web-accessible.
MMC will simplify administration by presenting one tool for all administrative tasks, including tasks that Disk Administrator, User Manager, and Performance Monitor currently perform. To read more about MMC fundamentals, go to http://www.microsoft.com. To learn more about MMC's design and functionality, see Keith Pleas and Dean Porter, "Microsoft Management Console," February 1997.
Putting It All Together
As you anticipate using NT 5.0 and new server technology in your organization, you need a clear picture of which features are most important for your system. The primary criterion in your evaluation of these features need to be reliability, rather than performance. After all, if you need a car to get you to work in all weather with minimum fuss and expense and maximum dependability, you buy a Ford--not a Ferrari. The same logic applies to your network servers.
Be aware that the new features in NT 5.0 can strain your network and storage subsystems. Technologies such as IntelliMirror require more disk space on the server and consume more network bandwidth. What's more important, however, is that these new technologies make your network server a single point of failure for all the desktops on your LAN. Large organizations with deep pockets can overcome the single-point-of-failure challenge with clustered NT systems. If your enterprise is on a less capacious budget, it can meet that challenge by using high-availability solutions. For example, features like RAID, redundant network interfaces, and other solutions that keep downtime to a minimum need to be high on your list of priorities.
If you want to take full advantage of NT 5.0's media management services, you'll need a hot-pluggable disk subsystem. Avoiding downtime is hard if you have to shut down your system every time you add a disk drive, so you'll also want servers with hot-swap drive bays. You might consider RAID controllers that support the addition of new disks to existing logical volumes.
MMC doesn't require hardware support, but now is a good time to start asking your software and hardware suppliers whether their management tools will be integrated into MMC or continue as standalone applications. Similarly to MMC, AD doesn't require hardware support, but AD will rely on your servers to resolve directory lookup requests quickly and reliably.
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