Sun Microsystems this week announced a program to convince customers using Intel-based servers running Microsoft Windows NT to support infrastructure workloads such as web serving to move to its Linux-based Cobalt RaQ or Qube server appliances, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes.
Sun hopes to tap into a large customer base, accounting for - possibly - millions of installed servers running Windows NT, which does not necessarily want to move to Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server, much less future Windows Server.NET releases.
Microsoft retired Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition and its Client Access licenses last October, and stopped selling regular editions of Windows NT Server 4.0 in November. While there are several loopholes which allow customers to buy Windows 2000, downgrade to Windows NT, and then upgrade at some future time to Windows 2000, this is probably too much of a hassle for a lot of companies to contemplate, especially now that they are several years more experienced with Web technologies.