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.

Samba is an open-source implementation of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol used for file and printer sharing by PCs running Windows. In effect, Samba enables a Linux or Unix server to function as a file server for client PCs running Windows software.

Jay White, IT manager at electronics firm BF Group, said that Samba is one of the most useful pieces of server software available for a mixed Windows and Linux environment. "Our Samba server has been online for 394 days so far. The total cost is the hardware plus 30 minutes of my time each year," he said.

Mark Twells, IT coordinator at a large education facility, said, "We run six Samba servers on a variety of hardware [and] we have around 1,000 users. Configuration is done using text files. Far from getting in the way, these actually simplify things, because I can copy chunks of settings from one system to another. I can't do that with Windows drag and drop."

Microsoft declined to comment on the results of the comparative benchmarking.

In addition to providing file and print capabilities, Samba can also act as a Windows NT 4.0 Primary Domain Controller (PDC) Server. This allows users to log in to the Samba server, which provides another cost saving compared with running a licensed Windows NT 4.0 PDC. Microsoft Active Directory is not supported by the current Samba 2.2.3, but will be in version 3, which is now under development.

Meanwhile preliminary test results show that the first production version of the open-source Apache 2.0 Web server software performs as well as Microsoft's IIS Web server software. And Suse will this week launch version 8 of its popular Linux distribution.

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