High time accuracy on Windows Servers - alternatives to w32tm?

Question

Microsoft's Windows Time Service is not designed to, and does not maintain second accuracy:

http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2007/10/23/high-accuracy-w32time-requirements.aspx

What software is available for Windows servers that maintains better than 1 second accuracy across a small (same-site) set of windows servers?

Solution

I use a Windows build of ntpd, available from Meinberg, to synchronize machines on a LAN to a central ntpd server (which in turn synchronizes to a few remote stratum 2 servers).

The ntpd documentation states the following:

It [ntpd] provides accuracies typically less than a millisecond on LANs and up to a few milliseconds on WANs.

Comments

[Adam Davis]

Similar to, but not a duplicate of serverfault.com/questions/88330/…

[joeqwerty]

What type of requirements do you have that require sub 1 second time accuracy?

[Adam Davis]

@joeqwerty - The question is due to this (minor) issue: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36610/so-server-time-sync but I'm also curious how this is handled for time critical applications in fields such as banking, trading, etc. My guess is they don't rely on windows for a time stamp - there are a variety of ways to get around this. But for sites like Stackoverflow, the cost of a 'real' time source might not be worthwhile, while a good NTPD can give you timing that's better than +/- one second.

[reinierpost]

Thanks a lot, this seems to have resolved my problem (which was a diffeent one, namely that I can't figure out how to tell w32tm to /resync even when the time is a month off).