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If you want to know the time, ask a policeman. And if you want to know from the
horse’s mouth how difficult a full-scale, global Windows 2000 rollout is likely to
be, ask Compaq.
Over the past few months, Compaq (one of Microsoft’s major partners) has been putting
some of its money where its mouth is and implementing Win2K to run many of its internal
business systems. This has been carried out partly in order to demonstrate to its
partners, customers and potential customers the effectiveness of a Windows 2000 rollout
across a major enterprise, following considerable debate among analysts in the industry
about the potential costliness of upgrading to the new operating system. "We
don’t always use every product we sell, but we like to act as a reference site for as
many products as possible," points out Mark Johnson, manager of platform technology
at Compaq.
But Compaq’s Windows 2000 rollout has not simply been a demonstration exercise. The
move to use the new software as a base for many of the company’s mission-critical
activity rests on sound business needs, says Johnson.
Why Win2K?
Over the past few years, Compaq has been through huge changes, including several major
business mergers, most notably the take-overs of Tandem and Digital, that left the company
with a huge spread of different hardware and software platforms. The company’s IT
teams have had to find a way to assimilate these different systems into a coherent overall
strategy and Win2K has proved a key element in this move. Before the mergers, Compaq was
largely running Windows NT on Intel-based hardware, with some Unix systems. NT was being
used at the heart of Compaq’s business operation, including running all its ERP
software. With the mergers, the largest operating systems that were brought into Compaq
were Tandem’s Nonstop Kernel and Digital’s Tru64 Unix, as well as OpenVMS.
"When we started merging, first with two or three smaller companies and then with
Tandem and Digital, it was clear that as Windows 2000 matured and our own organisation
grew more complex, Windows 2000 is the tool that will help us merge those companies
in," Johnson explains.
The company realised there would be little point in moving systems to Windows NT and then
having to move on again to Windows 2000. Instead, it decided to migrate existing Windows
NT4.0 systems over to Windows 2000 and to integrate this new environment with the other
existing systems across the company. Like many other businesses, Compaq is looking to
Windows 2000 to help it consolidate and clean up its overall IT environment, making it
easier to support.
The aim of migration
This was no small task. "We have in excess of 11,000 servers, of which five or six
thousand are now running Windows NT or Windows 2000," points out Johnson. With such
heavy existing use of NT, Compaq’s main aim in moving to Windows 2000 is to simplify
its overall IT infrastructure and, in particular, to cut down on the number of servers it
is running. At desktop level, the move from Windows 95 to Windows 2000 Professional will
provide users with a more robust system, says Johnson.
The overriding aim of the migration, though, is to reduce Compaq’s Total Cost of
Ownership and provide the company with greater flexibility in its IT environment. While
simply moving the desktop environment over to Windows 2000 would have provided substantial
benefits, the real gains will come from migrating the whole enterprise over to the new
system.
Reaching these goals has required careful planning and a team has been working on the
migration for the past three years. "Since we have such a close partnership with
Microsoft, this move was always seen as the next logical step," explains Johnson.
"The biggest problem with NT4.0 is that it is oriented to physical things and one of
the biggest benefits of Windows 2000 is that it has a more logical structure, which is
very important in terms of consolidating our infrastructure. Because of NT’s physical
separation, we have tended to add resources into different business units, which means we
have duplications in all these little pockets of the business that don’t really need
to be there."
What Compaq stands to gain?
At the moment, Compaq has 85,000 NT user accounts, with 3,800 servers in 13 master account
domains and 1,700 resource domains. The largest single master account domain holds almost
40,000 accounts. Moving to Windows 2000 will enable Compaq to cut the number of resource
domains from 1,700 to fewer than 50 and reduce the number of master account domains from
13 to four, making a big difference in manageability.
At the same time, the use of Windows 2000 clustering facilities means the company should
be able to cut out 800 existing servers from its infrastructure, which will save on
software licence fees and make everything much easier to manage. Eventually, as servers
are further consolidated into Windows 2000 clusters, the number of servers will be cut
even further. Johnson acknowledges that this is due not just to the new operating system,
but also to improvements in telecom communications within Compaq’s internal global
network, which is enabling the company to cut down on its communications servers. But key
to the improvements in overall IT management are many of the features within Windows 2000,
particularly Active Directory, he adds. "Active Directory has been a key component in
our planning," says Johnson. "It enables us to clean up our IP architecture and
to look very closely at what constitutes as site, including the LAN segment, physical
objects and IP addressing." Johnson adds that Active Directory would not function
correctly without a clean IP architecture, so a lot of time does need to be spent cleaning
up existing systems before moving to Windows 2000, particularly around the sub-net
boundaries.
While the planning for this migration has taken several years, the move itself has taken
only a relatively short amount of time. It has taken Johnson and his team of eight people
only three months to carry out the necessary work and Johnson says this is a reflection
both of the need for careful planning and also some of the work done by Microsoft to help
customers move over to the new system. "Some analysts I’ve talked to are focused
on how complex Windows 2000 is, but I disagree," he comments. "There is a lot to
learn in this technology but Microsoft has done a great job in providing assistance."
Lessons learnt
The biggest lesson learned by Johnson’s team is that it is much easier to add to
Windows 2000 than to take things out of it - so it is important to keep things simple and
not to over-engineer the new system. "For example," says Johnson, "if you
think you need five domains, that’s fine, but start with one." Particularly
important has been the emphasis on planning domain policies and setting them up correctly
within Active Directory. Crucial to this has been implementing dynamic DNS and ensuring it
can co-exist efficiently alongside Compaq’s existing Unix environment. This has
involved a good deal of work and planning, as well as intensive discussions with Microsoft
over the past year or so. "We have a large number of installed Unix systems, so we
recognised this as a key area," comments Johnson. "About a year ago we sat down
with Microsoft on this." The important thing for Compaq was that dynamic DNS needed
to be a child domain to its existing root domains. "Once Microsoft clearly understood
that, it was quickly architected," he says.
While it has clearly been necessary for the Compaq implementation team to have a good
grasp of the features and functionality of Windows 2000, Johnson believes there is no need
for companies implementing the system to be over-concerned with taking on board expensive
new technical skills. "People with NT4.0 knowledge will support Windows 2000
fine," he comments. But it is important, he stresses, for organisations to understand
how they are intending to use the new system and where it fits into their overall IT
direction.
Also important is an understanding of the benefits, but also the limitations, of the third
party management tools being developed to support Windows 2000 in an enterprise
environment. Since Compaq has implemented the system at an early stage of its development,
it is hardly surprising that it found a lack of fully-developed tools available.
"This is the weakest part of the implementation so far," says Johnson. He adds
that several software suppliers, including Legato, are working in this area, which should
provide valuable assistance for other companies when they come to make the same move and
in helping to monitor the systems once installed. Compaq began its implementation with a
small pilot system in the US. It then built up the number of users slowly, ensuring it had
the right domain models in place before moving on to set up the international architecture
for the new system. Compaq now has 250 infrastructure servers running Windows 2000 in
seven locations worldwide; eventually it will build up to a total of 330. "The system
has been extremely stable and very robust," comments Johnson.
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