With the introduction of non-domain controller servers in Windows NT Server 3.5, no longer do all servers need to be involved in authentication of accounts and replication of the SAM. The network administrator can dedicate a server to a specific task or function rather than sharing its processing capacity with its primary task and administrative tasks. Because these servers rarely had free time to process replications due to the heavy processing load of business operations, the non-domain controller server results in faster replication.
Because a non-domain controller server has less overhead than either a primary domain controller (PDC) or a backup domain controller (BDC), and is fully fault tolerant, it is an excellent platform for an applications server, running applications, such as SQL Server and SNA Server. These non-domain servers have Windows NT Workstation security but contain all of the server software, which means they can take advantage of such features as: