The UK-based magazine IT Week has these very interesting results. “With 10 weeks to go before firms must sign up to Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing scheme or pay full price for upgrades, new tests suggest open-source Samba software may offer a viable alternative to upgrading file servers to Windows 2000.”
“Results published this week in IT Week's sister publication PC Magazine show that the latest Samba software now surpasses the performance of Windows 2000 by about 100 percent under benchmark tests.
“In terms of scalability, the results show that Linux and Samba can handle four times as many client systems as Windows 2000 before performance begins to drop off. Consequently firms can save money on hardware and software upgrades, and can avoid the administrative and financial costs of licensing Windows file servers, by using the Samba alternative.