Microsoft News Tracker

Nate Mook at BetaNews has the details:

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia took the PDC 2005 stage Thursday morning to discuss the future of Windows Server. In addition to announcing Compute Cluster Edition Beta 1 and the first Longhorn Server CTP, Muglia introduced IIS 7.0 - complete with a modular architecture.

“We’ve learned from Apache,” acknowledged Bill Staples, product unit manager for IIS. Version 7.0 takes the IIS feature set and breaks it down into individual components, or modules, that can be loaded on an as-needed basis. The result is a Web server with much less overhead.
…
IIS has taken another page from Apache’s playbook as well: simple configuration.

IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the “Metabase” and replaces it with XML configuration files - an announcement that prompted cheers from the PDC audience.
…
ASP.NET has additionally been given a boost in the update. No longer requiring a plug-in as it did with previous IIS releases, ASP.NET is natively supported in version 7.0.

Checking the reaction of bloggers showed uniform enthusiasm for the enhancements. Robert McLaws has more including the possibility that IIS 7.0 might ship on Windows Vista, even the “Home” SKUs.

Ward Ralston at the Windows Server Division Weblog has the details:

We are really glad that we were able to deliver an updated build of Windows Server codenamed Longhorn for the PDC this week here in LA. The build is quite ‘hot off the press’.
…
The reason you are seeing the Vista branding in the Server product is simply due to some tandem development efforts with the vista team.
As far as the name - our current intentions are to stick with the naming convention we have used in other server products….

Bob Muglia reaffirmed in his Thursday keynote address that the ship date remains 2007. There’s also a Muglia Q&A with more details.

With apologies to DeForest Kelly, Dell shuttering Itanium server business:

Dell is phasing out Intel Itanium-based servers, a move by one of the chipmaker’s closest allies that reflects Dell’s emphasis on low-cost servers and the processor’s failure to spread into the mainstream.
…
More recent decisions at Microsoft also reinforce Dell’s direction. A coming version of Windows Server 2003 called R2 is geared for smaller servers and won’t support Itanium, and the next Windows server operating system, code-named Longhorn server, will only be geared [to support Itanium - ed.] for high-end server tasks, Microsoft said this month.

More details by following the link and at The Register - Abandon ship! Dell jumps off Itanium:

Dell has become the latest OEM to abandon Itanium, Intel’s ill-fated 64 bit chip. The processor’s future has been looking downbeat since Intel decided to adopt AMD’s 64 bit instruction set for its future servers, relegating IA-64 to high end niches.

Dell’s decision is hardly surprising given its poor sales figures. Dell lives or dies by high volumes, but last year shipped just 1,371 Itanium servers. That’s up from just 12 the previous year, but it was enough to give Dell five per cent of the IA-64 market. HP, Intel’s partner on the chip project, shipped 76 per cent of IA-64 systems.

The first public beta of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (now apparently called Compute Cluster Solution) was formally launched today at the PDC. First release for clusters of up to 128 machines is scheduled for 1H2006. More details at the Compute Cluster home page.

One interesting note - Peter Galli reports Open Source Code Finds Way into Microsoft Product:

Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface—a library specification for message passing proposed as a standard by a broad-based committee of vendors, implementers and users—in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition …

“MPI is key middleware that was designed by a consortia of all the supercomputing vendors in the 1990s to allow the easy portability of code. It abstracts away things like low-latency interconnect, and our focus is making it super easy for ISVs to move their code,” Kyril Faenov, Microsoft’s director for High Performance Computing, told eWEEK in a recent interview at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash.

“Actually, we are probably the first team at Microsoft that will actually ship an open-source component inside of our solution, but we haven’t made a lot of noise around this yet,” he said.

Microsoft is working with Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory operated by the University of Chicago, and has taken its MPICH2 reference implementation, which most ISVs have tested their code against, and optimized it for performance and security.

Basically, MPI was a necessity if Microsoft wanted their cluster offering to be taken seriously. Jerry Dennany has a critical review of the PDC presentation.

Dana Gardner:

But, man, I was not prepared for the deep, nay pervasive, use of RSS across the Microsoft palette of pending products. Indeed, Chairman and Chief Architect Bill Gates in his keynote presentation Tuesday described standardized and open subscription as the next major stop on the continuum of digital relationships. Bump this up to platform milestone from the level of “me-too” application feature on the scale of adoption.

Microsoft is using RSS 2.0 as a major conduit of myriad content — including business-to-business applications interactions — inside, across, and for wide area import/export of feeds throughout its software systems. Remember the digital nervous system? Well, RSS just became a new variety of spine.