Windows Server 2003

After some delay, Microsoft has released Windows Server 2003, and based on our review of the product, it has been worth the wait.

Just to clarify the naming process, Microsoft originally called this product .Net Server. Microsoft at one point decided to emphasize its push into Web services and its .Net platform by naming all of its server operating systems with a .Net tag. But customers expressed some confusion over the naming system, so Microsoft went back to the more traditional Windows Server 2003.

Windows 2003 Server addresses several shortcomings of prior Microsoft operating systems in areas of management, security, and performance.

In fact, in our tests, Windows 2003 Server outperformed Windows 2000 by about 900% when it came to measuring TCP performance in terms of session requests. And in our transaction tests, Windows 2003 Server was a good 200% to 300% faster than Windows 2000 when it came to a transaction involving 40 text pages. We did these tests with 1-processor, two-processor and 4-processor servers and the results were consistent across all the hardware variables.

Microsoft improved the security by taking privileges away from users and giving administrators more control over who gets access to which files and directories.

The product offers increased support for storage-area networks, and it has wizard controls that make management via Microsoft Management Console much easier.

Finally, the new operating system makes it easier to build Web services. In fact, we used the Visual Studio.Net tool to build a simple Active Server Pages Web application, which performed flawlessly. All in all, Windows 2003 Server is a major improvement over Windows 2000 in areas of management, storage, security and performance.

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0421rev.html