Microsoft demonstrated several new technology developments today, including four-server failover clustering for Windows 2000 and a 64-bit version of Windows 2000 at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles.

The company also showed a "server appliance" intended to make it easier for small businesses to set up a simple network server.

Officials also repeatedly stated that Microsoft will ship the first three editions of Windows 2000 -- Professional, the desktop edition; and Server and Advanced Server editions -- "this year."

Microsoft promised three weeks ago that the first demonstration of four-server clustering would take place sometime "this spring." (see: More Nodes For Win Clusters) However, today's demonstration showed three clustered servers failing over to a fourth server that was running in "hot standby" mode, so the server was running with no applications loaded. This allowed the server to take over all tasks of any of the other three servers. The company did not give a time frame for release of four-way clustering.

Microsoft also showed what president Steve Ballmer said was a version of Windows 2000 that had been ported from 32-bit code to 64-bit code. Ballmer said the company will release the 64-bit version sometime after Windows 2000, which is a 32-bit operating system, ships.

The demonstration featured a 64-bit port of the coming Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, which will come out after the first three editions of Windows 2000 and will be aimed at the very high end of server computing applications. Ballmer said the port was performed as simply as recompiling the code, implying that the 64-bit version could be made available quickly. Microsoft demonstrated the code running on both an Alpha processor machine as well as on an IA-64 emulator. As part of the demonstration, Microsoft demonstrated a 64-bit port of SQL Server 7 running on the ported operating system.

A 64-bit operating system is capable of addressing up to 8 terabytes of memory -- though even at today's prices, that would be expensive. Additionally, it is not clear that porting Windows 2000 or SQL Server to be 64-bit would be as simple to accomplish or available as quickly as Microsoft officials implied.

Ballmer also introduced the server appliance, which Microsoft developed in conjunction with Intel. The server appliance, which will run a slimmed-down version of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded Server and will be available from a number of vendors in the second half of the year, will priced at less than $2,000. However, it will not be an applications server, instead featuring Internet access and file and print server support. Users will get E-mail via Microsoft's Hotmail service on the Internet. It is designed to be very easy to set up and administer and is aimed solely at small businesses.

Microsoft officials also said that the second edition of Windows 98 -- a service update planned for this summer -- is entering beta testing this week, and that there will be one more release of Windows 98 sometime next year. That, the company expects, will be the last version of consumer Windows based on the existing MS-DOS and Windows 95 code base before it is replaced by the Windows 2000 kernel.