Scalability and performance of Microsoft Windows

As companies continue to rely on information technology to meet new business needs, server scalability and performance are critical requirements. Not only must today’s IT solutions deliver adequate levels of throughput to meet current peak processing requirements, but they must also offer a cost-effective path for scaling to support greater workloads in the future.

Growth in customer transactions, supporting new sales channels, automating business processes, integrating with new partners, and mining volumes of information to turn raw data into actionable business intelligence are just a few business requirements that can drive the need for additional processing power.

The introduction of the Microsoft Windows NT Server operating system in the early 1990s marked the start of a trend that continues to accelerate today: reducing costs by migrating from proprietary platforms to a commodity operating system running on industry-standard servers.

Many companies began building enterprise solutions onto the Window server platform because it met their performance and scalability requirements with far lower development, deployment, and long-term management costs.

Window server 2003

With the release of Window server 2003, Microsoft has once again raised the bar on server performance and scalability. Optimisations at all levels of the operating system deliver increased throughput for all common server workloads, especially on systems with more than eight processors.

When compared to Windows 2000 Server, throughput on Window Server 2003 is more than doubled in many scenarios, along with greater reliability and manageability. Throughput improvements are far higher when Window Server 2003 is compared to Windows NT Server 4.0, as are the differences in reliability and manageability.

And with support for new server-class 64-bit processors, Window Server 2003 can match the throughput of high-end Unix-based servers and at far more attractive price-performance ratios.

Benefits of upgrading to Window Server 2003

By taking advantage of the performance and scalability improvements provided by Window Server 2003, companies with existing Windows-based infrastructures can:

• Get more out of existing hardware investments—as required to support continually increasing workloads or new business applications
• Reduce administrative costs by consolidating onto fewer, more powerful servers

In either case, companies that upgrade to Window Server 2003 also benefit from improvements in the areas of security and manageability.

Window Server 2003 also provides a compelling proposition for companies that today rely on proprietary Unix-based solutions: a way to meet throughput requirements for mission-critical applications while realising far greater business agility and a significantly lower total cost of ownership.

Request more information online about Microsoft Windows scalability or read about how to work out a Windows server total cost of ownership.