With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft can claim parity on raw performance and dominance on price to performance comparisons with proprietary Unix systems. The graph above summarizes over two years’ worth of scores on the Transaction Processing Council’s TPC-C order entry benchmark. The graph shows absolute performance in transactions per minute (horizontal axis) and performance per thousand dollars of total hardware/software cost (vertical axis).

Historically, Microsoft has competed against its OS rivals primarily on a price to performance ratio. Windows 2000 Server scores are mainly clustered in a relatively low absolute performance region, but fare much better against systems such as HP-UX and IBM AIX in price to performance comparisons. The four highest performance marks for Windows Server 2000 were achieved on complex and expensive multi-server clusters. For Windows Server 2003, in contrast, the best results posted did not require multi-server clusters. However, they did make use of the company’s 64-bit Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition.