Digex

The world’s leading companies are outsourcing their Internet applications to Digex to gain speed to market, increase efficiency and focus on core competencies. As the leader in managed Web and applications hosting, Digex offers a complete suite of products and services. Digex relies on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 to provide the reliable, scalable and manageable environment their customers demand.

Reliability Is Key

"We started hosting some of the first Internet Web sites way back in 1993," says Rebecca Ward, group president of Digex. "We have seen our customers go from static Web sites, to electronic commerce, to outsourcing business applications. As the sites become more dynamic and mission-critical, reliability is a key element."

Windows 2000 offers flexible system configuration and maintenance by reducing required reboots by 90 percent, minimizing downtime. With Digex managing over thousands of servers, reliability and system availability is extremely important. "Digex believes that the ability to add patches, hot fixes, change services, and change settings without having to reboot servers is a great feature," says Joe Crawford, senior director of engineering at Digex.

Manageable

Windows 2000 provides features that allow Digex to easily deploy, configure and manage their servers. "What Digex is seeing with rolling upgrades and the manageability of deploying Windows 2000 Web servers is wonderful. Upgrading database servers has been accomplished with ease. We have performed rolling upgrades on internal sites as well as external customer Web sites with no problems," says Crawford.

The integration of Terminal Services with the Windows 2000 platform has simplified remote management. This is especially important for Digex, whose data centers are located in many geographic locations. Remote management tools are also allowing Digex to save time and money.

"Digex has found that the implementation of Terminal Services and remote administration tools has significantly reduced the time it takes to perform administrative tasks," says James Ream, lead architect of Digex. "It really takes us into the realm of a true enterprise operating system. We can now manage, from a single point, any number of servers to which we have network connectivity."

Internet Scalability and Performance

The Windows 2000 platform provides the scalability and performance Digex needs for their growing network. The Windows 2000 Active Directory™ service and Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 allow Digex to serve more users per server.

"One of the features of Windows 2000 that we are most excited about here at Digex is the implementation of Active Directory," says Ream. "It's the biggest improvement moving from Windows NT® 4.0 to Windows 2000. Active Directory gives us almost infinite control over security zones, organizational units and how we want to manage our customers' sites. While we are managing thousands of Web sites currently, we want to scale that into the tens of thousands. Active Directory makes that possible."

"Here at Digex we really believe that Windows 2000 is the platform for the future," states Ward. "It has the reliability, performance, scalability and security that our customers need as they move more and more complex business applications onto the Internet. Windows 2000 delivers for us."

For More Information

Digex is a leader in managed Web and application hosting. Their primary business focus is to provide each customer with a complete suite of products and services, the best technical support and an infrastructure built for e-business.

Learn more about Digex at the Digex Web site .

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to http://www.microsoft.com/.

Microsoft Software Used

Microsoft® BackOffice® Server
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition
Microsoft SQL Server™ 7.0
Microsoft Visual InterDev®
Microsoft Windows NT® with Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services 5.0