It"s not unheard of for some of the earliest adopters of Microsoft"s Vista this year to compare the experience to swimming in wet cement -- slow and not very pretty.
But word is filtering out of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant that indicates its new server could be considerably better. Ward Ralston at the Windows Server Division Weblog reports that "our MSN group who is dogfooding Windows Server 200 RC0" has achieved the kind of testing results that might prompt a double-take. In a side-by-side between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, the group set out to transfer 10.8 GB of "VirtualEarth Stitch files" from one server to another, and back again.
On Windows Server 2003, the data took five hours, 40 minutes and 30 seconds to transfer once, and more than six hours to transfer back again.
On Windows Server 2008, the same data took seven minutes and 45 seconds to transfer one way, and eight minutes and 10 seconds to transfer back. The Microsoft people spare you the task of doing all that math: "The improvement observed was ~45 times faster over windows 2003."
If the numbers are consistent and no other glitches come up (this software has been in beta for a few years now), it could prove compelling when it is launched - - an event now slated for the first quarter of next year.