These cloud and web hosting customers appreciate the cost savings associated with a lower cost infrastructure, yet still want to deploy a server-class product with reliability and security features and server OS certification.

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EBay, for instance, has reduced the number of server configurations it will deploy down to two. (Before it had 200 to 300 server configurations but 15 configurations accounted for 80 percent of the total population.) EBay now has a High Performance Computing server designed to handle transactions.

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The immediate consequence here is that Amazon EC2 customers will need to deploy copies of the same server instance in multiple regions to guarantee 100% system uptime, assuming, of course, that the wildly unlikely scenario that multiple Amazon cloud computing regions experience outages at the same time never transpires.

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There are additional server and access licenses to purchase to manage and deploy Forefront.

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The result, he says, is the ability to deploy new applications at one-tenth the infrastructure cost of a traditional server-based platform.

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With this acquisition, Oracle acquired important middleware tools like the Weblogic Server (a tool for deploying Java based enterprise applications) and Tuxedo (a tool used to deploy mainframe-based applications).

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One corporate user told Microsoft officials that his shop did not intend to deploy SP4 because "we have assessed the risk to be too high, " and had created a Systems Management Server package of year-2000 fixes that were issued after SP3.

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