Performance and scalability of Windows servers
Server performance and scalability are critical requirements as companies continue to rely on information technology to meet new business needs. 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 Windows server platform because it met their performance and scalability requirements with far lower development, deployment, and long-term management costs.
Windows server 2003
With the release of Windows 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 Windows Server 2003 is more than doubled in many scenarios and it also offers greater reliability and manageability. Furthermore, throughput improvements are far higher when Windows Server 2003 is compared to Windows NT Server 4.0 and it is a vast improvement with regard to reliability and manageability.
And with support for new server-class 64-bit processors, Windows Server 2003 can match the throughput of high-end Unix-based servers and at far more attractive price-performance ratios.
Benefits of upgrading to Windows Server 2003
By taking advantage of the performance and scalability improvements provided by Windows 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 Windows Server 2003 also benefit from improvements in the areas of security and manageability.
Windows 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.
To find out how a Windows Server 2003 meets your needs, call today on 0800 4584545. If a Windows server is not suitable for your business needs, you may find a Linux server more fitting.
