LAS VEGAS -- COMDEX Fall 2002, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced that early testing of engineering enhancements in the upcoming Microsoft(R) Windows(R) .NET Server 2003 shows dramatic performance improvements -- two times the performance or greater across most workloads* -- in the server compared with previous versions. Performance gains continue to be validated by original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners with Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks and other recently published tests. Early results indicate that Windows .NET Server 2003 will unquestionably deliver the speed and scalability that customers need in even the largest enterprise environments. "This is built to be the fastest Windows Server yet! When development of Windows .NET Server 2003 began, we set out to beat the great successes of Windows 2000 performance and deliver what customers were asking for," said Brian Valentine, senior vice president of the Windows Division at Microsoft Corp. "The engineering enhancements we've made to the product have yielded exceptional results for performance while maintaining the high bar on quality and security that customers want." "The extensive engineering work put into Windows .NET Server 2003 was immediately evident to us, and vital to the success our performance lab has had in generating new leadership benchmark results," said Mark Feverston, vice president of Enterprise Server Marketing at Unisys Corp. "Recent breakthrough Unisys ES7000 server TPC-C, TPC-H and SAP performance benchmarks reflect the broad strides Microsoft and Unisys have made in merging Unisys ES7000 mainframe-class scalability and performance with the superior economics of Windows." Performance Gains Bring Welcome Relief to Strained IT Budgets With its enhanced scalability, Windows .NET Server 2003 will be able to handle larger workloads on a single server without compromising performance. The benefit for customers is that Windows .NET Server 2003 enables them to get more out of their hardware investments. The increased efficiencies improve a customer's bottom line in a number of ways, including reducing hardware expenditures and administrative costs. "As a result of deploying Windows .NET Server 2003, we expect to eliminate as many as 700 of the 3,200 servers we currently maintain," said Nigel Stevens, vice president of Information Systems and Technology Alliances Worldwide at Reed Elsevier plc. "The efficiency of having fewer servers configured in a single global structure with standard architecture, central administration and a common deployment methodology, which the superior performance of Windows .NET Server 2003 enables, will allow us to reduce both rollout costs and TCO projection by upward of 15 percent." Windows .NET Server has been engineered to deliver an improved performance on existing hardware, as well as utilize the new innovations offered by OEMs for even better performance and scalability. "Using Windows .NET Server 2003, we expect to obtain greater efficiency through consolidation," said Len Couture, chief information officer at Enterasys Networks Inc. "Due to increased scalability and other efficiencies in the new platform, we will be able to reduce our datacenter server farm by at least 30 percent. That consolidation translates into substantial simplification of our computing environment and an operational cost savings of at least 20 percent." Engineering Innovations Lead to Greater Performance Performance engineering for Windows .NET Server 2003 was focused on four core elements of the server operating system: process scheduling, memory management, the disk subsystem and networking services. Enhancements to these core elements greatly increase scalability and performance across key server roles, including database server, application server, Web server, file and print server, directory services, and terminal services. -- Improved scheduling enables greater processor efficiency and prioritizes CPU resources for specific tasks while improving simultaneous work across processors for greater throughput. -- Enhanced memory management reduces CPU memory calls, thereby increasing processor availability; better caching heuristics improve access and input/output efficiency as well as enabling the memory manager to support large memory configurations on multiprocessor systems. -- Improved disk subsystem capabilities provide a mechanism for faster storing and retrieving of data through concurrent transactions per server, allowing more simultaneous access to data. -- Enhanced networking services access network bandwidth more efficiently. As a result, a customer's IT systems can support more concurrent end users on the network. In addition to significantly increasing the performance of core server operating system elements, Microsoft improved key services in Windows .NET Server 2003, such as Internet Information Services (IIS) and the Active Directory(R) service. -- Active Directory in Windows .NET Server 2003 contains enhancements that result in a faster logon for end users and faster data replication for remote offices, with better scale on multiprocessor machines and large directories. -- IIS has been redesigned to incorporate an advanced process model that greatly improves its reliability and performance. The inclusion of new page caching and connection management further improves throughput utilization of server resources. "It is not uncommon for customers to experience a decrease in performance with a new server operating system. The new functionality eats up whatever performance improvements might have been added," said Bill Moran, research director at industry analyst firm D.H. Brown Associates Inc. "That Microsoft has delivered Windows .NET Server 2003 with such dramatic increases in performance and scalability in symmetric multiprocessing environments, along with a wealth of innovative new features, is an impressive achievement." Fast By Any Measure Core operating system improvements, while significant for all systems, will particularly benefit performance on larger multiprocessor systems. Windows .NET Server 2003 will support Itanium 2-based, 64-way multiprocessing systems, allowing it to scale to the largest Intel-based servers. Performance increases are evidenced in recent public benchmark results, including the TPC-C and TPC-H, placing Windows .NET Server 2003 in the top 10 of the leading industry benchmarks for performance. At the same time, it is consistently ranked at the top for price/performance. Application server benchmarks recently performed by the Middleware Co., a specialist in advanced enterprise Java technology training and consulting, compared the performance of two mainstream J2EE application servers with Microsoft .NET application server performance on the Windows Server platform (http://www.middleware-company.com/j2eedotnetbench/ ). The .NET application server implementation on Windows .NET Server 2003 outperformed that of Windows 2000 by up to 150 percent. * Because these results were obtained using prefinal code, they should not be considered fully conclusive for final system performance. Microsoft encourages benchmark testing of final, gold-code product for the most accurate testing results.