Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Windows Server 2003, which the company says offers service providers new efficiencies in performance and Web services creation and deployment. Also new today are Visual Studio.NET 2003 and a 64-bit version of SQL Server, which can support much larger databases.
In addition to using the products for internal IT purposes, service providers can use these tools as a platform for creating and selling commercial services such as VPN or other secure connections, or to support hosted services such as e-mail hosting or Web hosting.
According to Pascal Martin, general manager for platform and application hosting in Microsoft's Network Service Provider group, companies adopting the new Windows Server 2003 for IT will gain 30 percent efficiency over Windows NT 4.0.Also, companies will be able to write and deploy applications based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET in about half the time it has taken in the past, says Martin. Qwest Communications International Inc. is among the major telephone companies that is using Microsoft infrastructure to support its Web services infrastructure, he adds.
Microsoft’s Web server has been entirely rewritten with this release so it can better handle application failures, says Martin. He explains that the architecture clearly separates applications and customers, so that it one application or customer runs into problems, it doesn’t effect other applications or users.
A study released this week by Chicago-based analyst firm Doculabs Inc. reported that in its tests .NET beat J2EE by a wide margin in every test conducted; .NET/Windows Server 2003 delivered 200 percent better throughput than JBOSS/Linux on the same hardware; .NET running against an Oracle backend beat J2EE against the same Oracle backend; .NET against a SQL Server 2000 vs. Oracle backend yielded 45 percent better throughput; .NET/Windows Server 2003 delivered significantly better throughput and supported significantly more users than .NET/Windows 2000 on the same hardware.
