Windows 2000 active directory is key to Microsoft's hold on the server market.
What is allows you to do is store all your user info, machine info, licensing
info, everything in this monster directory.  Microsoft apps will use this 
directory to look up everything from another employee's email address to their
telephone number.  It is ldap on steroids.  It also offers fault tolerance
in the fact it can make virtual network objects such as network shares.  These
can get replicated where ever they need to be.

Bottom line is if you want to run microsoft on the desktop, you'll kind of be
forced to use Active Directory Services to get full use of your apps.  In a
domain environment that is all 2000, you're required to have it.

Why will people use it over Novell NDS?  Although novell is technically superior
and their NDS is only one tenth the size of Microsoft's ADS, not much integrates
with the novell NDS.  It's the beta vs VHS thing all over again.

If 2000 proves stable, and the total rewrite was totally based on the unix
kernel (not surprised if it is later revealed that there is a lot of linux code
in 2000) the fault tolerant features will give it an edge over other NOSs, 
including Linux.  2000 also does some other neat things like include the 
ability to mount partitions on a directory (looking more unix-like all the time)
and it has a veritas journalled file system.  The FS is fast.

My prediction:  Linux will continue to flourish in environments where cost is
an issue.  It's lean and mean kernel will allow it to run on almost anything.
The stability issue, in my experience, doesn't seem to be as much of a point
of contention.  Let's face it, NT sucked but 2000 _seems_ stable.  We've
rolled it out in a server production environment and haven't had a single 
crash in four months (which was how long ago we deployed it).

In many ways, for a NOS with ADS, it is actually more fault tolerant than
Linux.  This makes me a little scared because M$ seems to have done something
right and made it easy for people to use.  With advanced server 2000, it offers
clustering out of the box.  This works like VRRP on steroids.  I hope the 
linux networking gurus can come out with something like this real soon, 
because this is what we need to get Linux into the big corporations like where
I work (Andrew Corp www.andrew.com).  

Thoughts and opinions?

	Mike Neuliep
	mike@illiana.net