The Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server operating system meets the needs of the majority of large businesses today, providing near-linear scalability for very large database, application, and messaging systems, as measured by industry standards and independently audited benchmarks. This document references a number of benchmarks in order to compare Windows 2000 Server running on different platforms. Additionally, it contrasts the scalability of Windows 2000 Server with other server operating systems, including UNIX.
Windows 2000 Server-based systems deliver computational, transaction, and I/O capacity for the majority of application workload profiles. Windows 2000 Server enables scaling to support thousands of online transaction-processing users or mail-client and messaging-client systems on a single, large symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) server. In replicated, distributed, and partitioned systems, Windows 2000 Advanced Server can support even larger user populations which, in some cases, exceed more than 100,000 users across multiple servers. Windows 2000 Datacenter goes further still.
This document outlines issues surrounding overall system scalability, presenting a detailed analysis of the available data and a technical discussion of scalability in the Windows 2000 Server family at the hardware and operating system level.
