Microsoft continued turning up the heat on Linux with its "Get The Facts" campaign last week. This time, Microsoft is claiming that Windows 2003 is faster at file and print serving tasks than a Red Hat Linux server, based on a test performed by Veritest.

The tests pitted a Windows 2003 Standard Edition server against Red Hat Linux Enterprise Linux ES 3.0 running Samba 3.0 - a software package that allows Linux/Unix servers to host Windows clients. The machines were loaded onto an HP DL380 G3 with two 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processors, 4G bytes of RAM and an Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Gigabit Server Adapter. Also used was a Dell PowerEdge 500SC server configured with one 1 GHz Pentium III processor, 1G byte of RAM, an onboard Intel 100M bit/sec Ethernet network adapter, and one Intel PRO/100 Fast Ethernet NIC.

Microsoft says the results showed that the Windows server performed 46% better than the HP-based Linux box, and 24% better than the Dell Linux server. Microsoft also claims that a software upgrade to Windows 2003, which tweaks how the server writes data to disk under certain high-activity circumstances, boosted file-serving performance on both server boxes by 60% over the Linux servers.

While it has been Microsoft policy in past years to dismiss Linux as a minor competitor, the gloves seem to be coming on. Microsoft established its "Get The Facts" Web in January of this year, and has attended the last several LinuxWorld shows promoting itself against Linux. The torrent growth of Linux may be prompting this - Gartner says Linux server revenue was up 57% in the most recent quarter.