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January 24, 2000

Windows 2000 Passes Early Test
Operating system handles holiday shopping crunch for Barnesandnoble.com

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s the Feb. 17 launch date for Windows 2000 nears, reports from early adopters about its performance continue to be favorable. Barnesandnoble.com had so much faith in the new operating system that the online bookseller deployed the final code in time for the holiday shopping season--and the system's performance got the company through the end-of-year crunch.

After a six-month evaluation program ended in October, Barnesandnoble.com installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server on a cluster of Compaq's new ProLiant 8500 servers to handle order processing. (Its Web site, which runs Windows NT Server 4.0, was not upgraded.) The 1999 holiday season was expected to be huge for E-commerce players, and Barnesandnoble.com had to scale up to handle the volume. "We knew we'd be looking at sales triple to our prior year, and we needed the scalability and throughput that both the new hardware and Windows 2000 would provide," says Gary King, CIO for Barnesandnoble.com, in New York. He says he believed the Web site would be able to handle the increase in visitors, but he thought the back-end systems running NT 4.0 wouldn't be able to handle the resulting orders--and that Windows 2000's symmetric multiprocessing would.

The company converted to Windows 2000 Release Candidate 3 during a weekend in November. Barnesandnoble.com's six-month testing period--which covered Windows 2000's use of the processors, failover in cluster configurations, scalability, and performance--proved helpful in the deployment. It took less than two days to make the switch, with no hiccups, King says. When Windows 2000 went live in December, the company upgraded the servers to the final code. The process was almost bug-free. Barnesandnoble.com did experience a message-queuing error that slowed throughput, but Microsoft fixed the bug, and the fix will be in the final code.

"Windows 2000 performed as we forecasted," King says. "We tripled our prior-year fourth-quarter volumes. It allowed us to handle more customers than we ever have in our history, and it gave us the reliability we needed."

The company benefited from being a member of Microsoft's early-adopter program--but most users won't receive the same level of attention that Barnesandnoble.com got. "If you're not a rapid- or joint-deployment partner, then it may not be this easy," says Laura DiDio, a senior analyst with Giga Information Group. "I think some organizations will have a rough ride for a combination of reasons: bugs, unfamiliarity with the new operating system, improper training, and the complexity of Windows 2000."

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