Ward Ralston: Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista are introducing some of the biggest changes to our networking stack in recent memory. From the server side, I think this is one of the biggest overlooked features of Windows Server 2008.
To that point, earlier this year we released the Tolly Group Whitepaper that showed the how the improvements to our TCP/IP stack and SMB 2.0 Protocol gave us a 3.5x time-to-completion improvement over Windows Server 2003. The paper really is a good read and it has some good technical details of what the exact improvements are that allow this to happen. (receive window auto-tuning, SMB File handles and buffer sizes, etc)
One of the better reports that I have seen on the networking improvements came across my inbox this morning, and it came from our MSN group who is dogfooding Windows Server 200 RC0.