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This chapter has focused on giving an overview of the different servers offered by Microsoft. You have seen that the Windows Server family has been expanded, with a dedicated Web server in the Windows Server 2003 editions, compared to the existing Windows 2000 family. You have also learned about the various .NET Enterprise Servers available, and how they can fit into the design of a scalable .NET application.
The point of this chapter is to give you ideas where Microsoft's servers are best suited for use. Keep in mind that we do not say they necessarily are the best choice at all times, but many times they are. Which application to use is something you have to decide when you design your application, based on what you need to accomplish and on what standards exist in your enterprise. As an IT architect and a system designer, we feel it is important to have knowledge about the technologies that Microsoft offers to be able to make the correct decisions early in the design process, and thereby avoid poor design that affects performance and scalability in the end. Microsoft has shaped up in many areas, and nowadays offers good alternatives to what have been more or less de facto standards in the industry earlier. By using an infrastructure that seamlessly integrates many applications with each other, performance, scalability, and manageability gains can be made.
Microsoft has shown that SQL Server is a competitive database alternative, both in performance and price. These results are achieved by using clustering techniques described later in this book.
Our own testing also shows that Web sites running ASP.NET on Windows Server 2003 display great performance gains compared to ASP.NET on Windows 2000. Others have made similar results as well.
What this all adds up to is that Microsoft definitely is on the right track, and more and more of our customers are interested in deploying large .NET applications. This means that if we as designers, architects, and developers do not know how, and with what, to build these applications, we might suddenly find ourselves run over by those who do.
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