Barnesandnoble.com
Barnesandnoble.com customers expect a fast, reliable and on-time delivery of their online purchases. Barnesandnoble.com is relying on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server to keep their customers satisfied. Windows 2000 has provided Barnesandnoble.com a reliable, scalable and a new way of life.
Buy a gift online this past holiday season? Rest assured, barnesandnoble.com had the technology to deliver your order in time for the holidays. Barnesandnoble.com prepared for the ‘99 holiday shopping season by upgrading to Microsoft Windows 2000. The company deployed Windows 2000-based servers for its order-fulfillment and product-distribution services. The result has been improved reliability, availability, scalability and ease of management.
"We were able to improve our scalability and reliability such that we feel very confident in deploying Windows 2000 for this, our most important shopping season." says Gary King, chief information officer for barnesandnoble.com.
Reliable and Scalable
"What we are seeing in terms of availability, reliability, and ease of maintenance is dramatically better than what we had previously with our Windows NT 4.0 environment." At barnesandnoble.com, systems availability is now in the 99.98 percent range. And the site has not needed to purchase uptime, 24 X 7 performance guarantees from its system supplier. According to Barnesandnoble.com, Windows 2000 has higher reliability and availability than Windows NT. Windows 2000 includes architectural changes that improve the system's stability, provides tools to help developers create more reliable code and gives administrators new ways to increase operating system uptime.
But more important have been the improvements in scalability.
Barnesandnoble.com has found that the same code that the company used to run on Windows NT Server-based machines runs nearly 30 percent faster on computers running Windows 2000. The site has also seen improvements in performance because Microsoft Message Queuing, Transaction Services and other services that came as add-ons to Windows NT are now integrated with Windows 2000.
Easy to Use and Manage
The new operating system is also easy to manage. Barnesandnoble.com prefers operating multiple small, distributed systems, as is possible with Windows 2000, rather than a few large, single-system environments.
Since launching its online business in March 1997, barnesandnoble.com has become one of the world's largest web sites and the fourth largest e-commerce retailer. Focused largely on the sale of books, music, software, magazines, prints, posters, and related products, the company has capitalized on the recognized brand value of the Barnes & Noble name to become the second largest, and one of the fastest growing, online distributors of books. Already one of the Web's most popular sites, barnesandnoble.com continues to improve its service and meet market demands to keep up with its competition.
"Nowhere else in business are the battles so fierce, the competitors so aggressive, and the consumer so demanding as in online retail," King said. Windows 2000 is one way barnesandnoble.com can keep its competitive edge.
For More Information
Since their launch in 1997, BN.com has become the world’s fourth largest e-commerce retailer. BN.com offers books, music, software, magazines, prints, posters, and related products.
Learn more about barnesandnoble.com at the BN.com 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 Products Used
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Microsoft Cluster Server
Microsoft BackOffice® Server 4.0
Microsoft Office 97
Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0
Microsoft Message Queue Server 1.0
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01
Microsoft Visual Basic® 6.0
Microsoft Visual C++® 6.0
Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe™ 6.0
