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Gartner Group Suggests Dumping IIS For Now
sachmet is one of the many readers who contributed news that "Gartner Group is now recommending that
IIS be replaced in corporate environments. This is based on the fact that TCO for IIS is rising due to the almost-weekly patches sent out by MS, and even then, it's nearly impossible to get patched quickly enough. Best part: 'Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS,' which they say has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year." Gartner hasn't always said favorable things about Linux systems in the workplace, but the businesses that rely on this type of analysis to justify purchasing decisions may find this one interesting. Update: 09/24 22:04 GMT by T :As several people have pointed out, the 80% figure appears to be Gartner's odds that IIS won't be rewritten that soon, rather than the other way around (.673334 probability).
It is true though: companies relies on these reports to make decisions, so it's still relevant.
What about the TCO for Linux?
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
The upcoming 'solution' to this, EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
I need to take a dump too!
I think the only thing with a bigger security hole than IIS is the Goatse.cx guy
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
What the hell is going on in that video? I can't understand what they're doing.