Microsoft Corp. has released the second beta of Windows 2000 DataCenter, the high-end version of the company’s new operating system. DataCenter will not be available off the shelf like the other Win 2000 products. Original equipment manufacturers (OEM) will be required to certify that DataCenter runs on their hardware. Nearly a dozen OEMs are participating in this second beta cycle, and the JDP customers can only get DataCenter Beta 2 through their OEMs. The first beta was sent directly to enterprise customers. Beta 2 includes the completed Process Management Tool, which allows users to manage workloads on the server and allocate resources such as CPUs and memory. For example, users can assign applications running on DataCenter to a specific processor or set of processors and dynamically change the allocation to handle increased loads. DataCenter Server supports up to 32 processors, 64G bytes of RAM, four-node clustering, and 32-node network load balancing. It is also optimized for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP).
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