Business Value: The Windows 2000 Server Family goes beyond providing the essentials, such as file, print, and communications. It is engineered specifically to let companies reliably and economically use emerging technologies to improve business profitability and increase their agility in an ever-changing marketplace.

Flexible Integration: You can deploy new servers into your existing network one at a time, upgrade individual NT 4.0 servers, upgrade top-down throughout your organization; or anywhere in between. You can add Windows 2000 servers to your existing Windows NT 4.0-, Novell NetWare-, or UNIX-based environments and see immediate improvements in performance, reliability and manageability.

Reliability: Significant improvements in the Windows 2000 system architecture help deliver higher uptime than either Windows NT or competitive systems. Businesses can obtain 99.999 percent uptime with Windows 2000 Datacenter Server on qualified systems from Microsoft OEM partners. This level of uptime is also known as "five nines," and it equates to less than 5 minutes of downtime a year.
Availability: For critical applications, businesses often require a fallback mechanism to make sure users aren't interrupted if a server is unavailable. The Advanced Server and Datacenter Server editions of the Windows 2000 Server Family let you increase your system's availability using the clustering technologies included with the operating system, which let you couple servers together to support specific tasks.

Performance: Faster is better, but it doesn't have to be more expensive. According to the Transaction Processing Council , Windows 2000 Advanced Server delivers industry-leading performance for less than half the cost of the most scalable UNIX-based solution. Windows 2000 Advanced Server currently holds the top four TPC-C benchmark results. Microsoft tests show that Windows 2000 Server is up to 49 percent faster when deployed as a file server. Windows 2000 performance scales even better when additional CPUs are added; providing a performance improvement of up to 125 percent over Windows NT Server 4.0.

Scalability: The Windows 2000 Server Family includes three versions, each able to reliably and affordably handle larger loads. Start with Windows 2000 Server, and move up as needed to Windows 2000 Advanced Server and companion products.

Manageability: The Windows 2000 Server Family makes it easier to deploy, configure, and use advanced networking capabilities by providing centralized, customizable management services. You can easily manage servers remotely by taking advantage of increased performance in the integrated Terminal Services. You can dynamically manage storage on file servers without interrupting end users. You can also use Active Directory to centrally manage users and devices across your entire network. The result is lower costs; the move to the Windows 2000 platform can potentially reduce overall total cost of ownership by 17 percent, reduce end-user down time costs by 50 percent, and reduce direct costs by approximately 13 percent.

Internet-Ready: Windows 2000 Server provides a well-integrated package containing the application development environment, Web services, security, and scalability you need to get more out of your applications. Plus, you can build new and versatile solutions using the most complete set of Internet technologies available.
Hardware: Windows 2000 supports a wide range of hardware and peripherals. Of particular interest for Windows 2000 Advanced and Datacenter Server users is support for the latest Intel®-based multi-processor hardware, which provides a cost-effective and flexible alternative to proprietary solutions for supporting extremely large applications.

Prepare for .NET: The goal of .NET is to make Internet-based computing and communications easier to use, more easily personalized, and more productive for businesses and consumers. The Windows 2000 Server Family fits into the .NET future by introducing essential building blocks, such as simplified Internet-centric development computing, Extensible Markup Language (XML) support, and communications, which are central features of the .NET platform. Building critical infrastructure on Windows 2000 today puts you in the ideal position to take advantage of the rapidly emerging .NET services.