We tested Windows Server 2003, which officially launches this week, and found that Microsoft's new server operating system delivers better performance, tighter security and easier management than its predecessor.

Windows 2003 also provides increased support for managing storage-area networks and makes it easier for customers to build Web services.

This product had been named .Net Server, part of Microsoft's plan to brand all its server products under the .Net Web services umbrella.

The name has changed, but Windows 2003 still maintains a strong Web services hooks. Services created within the .Net framework can take advantage of network, administration and management features built into Windows 2003.

We used Microsoft's VisualStudio.Net tool and plug-ins from third parties such as Eiffel's ENVision to build a simple Active Server Pages Web application that monitored growth in a series of subfolders. Via a Web page, we watched the subfolder grow, change colors and flash when growth reached a predefined "critical" stage.

The application easily could be distributed by policy to other servers, then communicate with a"console page" if desired. Such applications were easily distributed and posted so they could be shared, used and, if desired, modified by others.

Microsoft added User Description Discovery and Integration support to Active Directory. UDDI is a registry and discovery/proxy service for applications that helps the operating system locate resources on local and remote servers. We tested support for this Web services feature, and it worked well.

Web performance boost

Microsoft says it has rewritten most of the Internet Information Server code that comes bundled with Windows 2003. Our tests showed that effort has produced dramatic results. We used Spirent Communications' WebAvalanche to test the total number of connections per second, maximum number of transactions per second, and maximum number of open connections per second on Windows Advanced Server 2000 and Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition. We ran them on three different levels of server - configured at the defaults without optimizing either platform (see "How we did it").

The biggest performance gains came in TCP performance. In our maximum TCP connection test, which measures the capacity of the server to respond or TCP session requests, the numbers for Win 2003 came in almost 900% higher than those of Win 2000. In a more stringent transactional test, in which we tested static Web page transaction cycles - downloading 40 text pages per transaction with pauses - Win 2003 showed improvements in performance ranging from 161% to 287% depending on which hardware server we used to conduct the test.

In an Intel IOMeter test between Win 2000 and Win 2003 running on the same hardware, we saw a 31% increase in number of I/Os per second on Win 2003 - with no optimizations on either platform.