News

Windows Server 2003 Released to Manufacturing

• By Scott Bekker
• March 28, 2003

"Today, Windows Server 2003 was released to manufacturing, and it is done," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of the Windows Server group.

Release to Manufacturing, or RTM, is the official development milestone when the code is finished and any further changes must come in hotfixes and service packs. At the RTM stage, the OS is distributed to OEMs and sent to Microsoft's manufacturing sites for mass production.

The milestone marks the end of an oft-delayed, three-year development process that involved 5,000 Microsoft developers and thousands of customers. Recent Microsoft RTMs, for Windows XP and Windows 2000, have come two months before the product launch date, instead of the one-month timeframe here. Microsoft had previously been targeting a late February RTM, which then fell further and further into March. However, company officials have maintained that the OS would be ready for launch on April 24. And those previous RTM examples involved client operating systems, which present greater logistical challenges due to their higher volumes.

Still, without saying so directly, Microsoft appears to be preparing the industry not to expect Windows Server 2003 on retailers' shelves right on April 24.

"The product will be available for download within 24 hours for select audiences and we will make the product available to all commercial channels OEMs, System Builders and others as well. Some of these channels have longer time to market -- for instance retail takes a bit longer than OEMs," a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

Analyst Al Gillen of IDC noted that relatively few of Microsoft's server operating system sales go through the retail channel. "I would tend to say that the majority of the Windows server operating systems are going out through the OEM and the business-to-business channel, not retail," Gillen said.

Jay Bretzmann, director of IBM's eServer xSeries, said the month between RTM and launch gives IBM plenty of time to get servers ready to ship with the new OS. "I think we will ship the bulk of the line supporting Windows Server 2003 at the Microsoft launch, and we will have the Datacenter version shortly after," Bretzmann said. Because of Microsoft's special stress-test and other requirements for vendors to sell Datacenter Server, those systems generally take longer to prepare.

Taking the opportunity of the RTM announcement to tout the enhancements coming in Windows Server 2003, Veghte listed the most important selling points as the high degree of quality assurance testing, the huge emphasis on security in the release and major improvements in scalability.

"This is the most comprehensively tested software we've ever done," Veghte said. Testing involved the longest stress tests yet for a Windows operating system, and extensive testing of more than 60 customers environments in Microsoft's engineering center.

"We had 561,000 customers signed up for the Customer Preview Program. That is the most significant preview program Microsoft has ever run," Veghte said. By comparison, Veghte said, there were about 265,000 preview downloads for Windows XP.

As the first major product focus of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, Windows Server 2003 received a code scrub and feature evaluation unlike any previous version of Windows. Veghte on Friday cited the cost of the effort within the Windows R&D budget as $200 million, a figure Microsoft has used earlier for the cost of the initiative across the whole company.

Veghte said Windows Server 2003 has "three times less attack surface than NT 4," and he added, "We're seeing customers report 20 percent increases in security."

Scalability is also a major area of enhancement, especially in the 64-bit Datacenter Edition, which will support up to 64 processors and 512 GB of RAM. "Windows Server 2003 is about 100 times more scalable than NT 4 and about 1/10th the cost per transaction. It's about two times the performance of Windows 2000," said Veghte, adding, "You're going to see some very exciting benchmarks at the launch."

Among other highlights, according to Veghte: