PERSPECTIVES Continued

If your environment requires near-constant uptime, then look to any of the historically mature operating systems: MVS, VMS and MPE. Although this may seem somewhat ludicrous on the surface, these syst ems are more robust than anything else on the market. The level of application control and system recovery these systems provide is simply unmatched by any general-purpose operating system.

Network Computing's intranet and Internet services were hosted by a Digital Equipment DEC MicroVAX 3100, and although the system was old and slow, it was always up. Since Network Computing switched to NT-based services a year ago, there has been a string of problems cropping up on a weekly basis. The reliability is just too low, even for our modest usage.

Although Microsoft often brags about NT's reliability and crash-prot ection features, these are generally limited to the application environment, and not to the OS itself. Although I've rarely seen the entire NT system crash from a bad application, I've seen the OS crash on many occasions. Meanwhile, there are scores of so-called legacy sites whose continuous system uptime is measured in years.

Now, I don't want to come off sounding like I hate NT or that I don't think it has a place in the market. I think it offers an excellent value proposition to customers who don't need tremendous network services, superscalable back-end applications or industrial-strength reliability, but instead, just want a little of each. It is the best damned station wagon on the market.

Continuing the analogy, you'll notice that some of the best-selling cars on the market just happen to be minivans. Many people find the horizontal-value proposition extremely attractive, and I expect the same thing to be found here. It's also important to realize that most of these people also have more than one car, and that the other car is hardly ever another minivan.

I also think that NT is not alone in this. IBM's OS/2 also fits the station wagon value-proposition model fairly well. By trying to be all things to all people, both of these operating systems are failing to provide any compelling vertical values in any one specialty area.

Before you choose the platform you'll be living wi th for the next few years, try to isolate what's going to be important for you and your organization. Will you need great performance for a variety of sites in your organization? Will you need superscalable application servers for large numbers of users? Or will you need guaranteed uptime and access to legacy systems? My bet is that you'll need all three, and if so, then welcome to networking and the three-car garage. If you don't need any of these extremes, then a o ne-car scenario will likely work well enough for you--at least in the short term.

Eric Hall is an independent consultant and freelance writer, currently working in Northern California. He can be reached at ehall@nwc.com.