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A Strategic Comparison of Windows Vs. Unix
Ramsed writes "On LinuxWorld Paul Murphy wrote an article comparing Unix and Windows for a 500-student system and a 5,000-user manufacturing company. Summary: Most of the Windows versus Unix debate has been cast in terms of which is technically better or which is cheaper, but the real question is, 'Under what circumstances is it smarter to pick one technology rather than the other?'"
I think this article has some excellent points but i do question a couple of things about the figures - i disagree with the assertion that The windows support job is full time and the Unix is not - thats a wishfull thinking idea - If you are smar about this you run a Standard Environment on a RIS build for all the workstations and your support costs crash to the floor on windows - i would know that in a system of this type 4 staff will be busy but adequate.
I also agree that the UNIX servers will likely be more robust but i think its optomistic to state that the suport on desktops will be lower - the fact is theres not a lot of pre existing information to support this.
I think they are actually about the same in support costs and that works the costs out the same - having said that i can see a lot of advantages to the UNIX solution with open source giving access to a much wider range of tools at a lower cost - i would point out that MS dont force you to move up and i would also point out that on 500 machines the license costs and upgrade coss are lower as you would choose a volume licensing or select agreement basis (you would NEVER pay retail prices)
Good article but and well worth a read - i do have a slight question on bias - that is if a writer who supports open source working on an open source publicatiopn would ever make a reccomendation for closed source - i personally think that the Lonux desktop is closer than it was and almost there - and i also think everyone should have a choice in what they use-stuff like this can be a good start in helping people choose.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
The one thing the reviewer fails to compare is performance. There is no way that one 2x750MHz system is going to compare with 500 900MHz celerons, even if it is a Sun 4800 w/ 12GB of ram.
I use solaris remotely from sunray terminals at school. The performance isn't terrible, but when there are more than 10 or so people on a server, I feel like I'm using a pentium 100. And that's when only a couple of them are doing CPU intensive stuff. I'll take a dedicated CPU and minor stability problems any day of the week. 2K is actually a pretty solid OS as long as it's running on good hardware.
There are many reasons to dislike Windows. Reliability, however, is not one of them. My desktop running Windows XP hasn't crashed yet due to software. Individual programs crash, sure, but the OS is rock solid. My laptop running Win2k has gone for up to a week without rebooting - that's going between multiple network environments, hardware configurations, and going in and out of suspend and hibernate.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to bash Windows such as lackluster security (although a patched system can be as secure as a patched GNU/Linux installation).
Working with end users, I find that Windows is both hard to learn AND hard to use. Nobody's figured out how to make a truly intuitive interface yet, including Linux and Windows. Users don't get or accept the concept that there are multiple ways of doing things - they get locked into the first technique they learn, such as going to the file menu and clicking exit rather than hitting the big x. They are STILL afraid of breaking things, which is unfortunately still a valid fear.
Nope. That'd work just fine - heck, Sun reccomends a 450 for 50 machines. Consider that the 4800 is just that much damned faster per proc, and case closed. Also remember *shared memory*. Only 1 instance of the program itself is run - the rest is just individual states. Assuming Windows and *nix are equally stable (I disagree, but beyond the scope of this), the *nix solution is still more worth it - 'cause you sure as hell ain't getting Windows on anything that's gonna touch a damned 4800.
SIG: HUP
Thats 25 GigaBytes of RAM, not counting the slowaris overhead.
Then install 50 GB for good measure. The 4800 is one hellofa machine and can handle up to 96 GB of RAM.
For design, it'll always be a Mac.
Best tool for the situation I say.
Our department his a small public usage lab of newer iMacs (700 MHz G3 w/ 512 MB PC100 ram). To make life a lot easier, we setup Apple's netboot software on an OS X server and configured the stock harddrives on the iMacs for use as a scratch/temp drive for user use. The setup has been wonderful... boot times are a bit longer than normal, but still not too bad. There is no such thing as software maintainance on any of the iMacs anymore as the internal drives are simply a free for all space (though we do find some FUNKY stuff on them every now and then). The users are happy and do everything from web surfing to DV firewire video editing on the machines. Though, I have to admit, 50% of the users in that lab simply burn CDs with the iMac's internal CDRW.
Oh yes it is, if you want to talk GUIs vs. CLIs, which the previous poster did.
CLIs are easy only if you are already familiar with the specific commands you want to use. No matter how much CLI experience you have, that doesn't help you when trying to learn how to do a new task.
On the other hand, a well-designed GUI can be easy even if the user has never used it before, as long as he/she is at least familiar with the general concepts of how GUIs work.
Finding the right command in a GUI menu is a hell of a lot easier than trying to guess both a) If a command-line tool exists to do a certain task and b) What that command might be called.
Free Hans!
Still, would the comparison change drastically when OS X is ready for primetime?
MS recently completed the Mac OS X version of Office (Office v.X) and it should be shipping soon. If that isn't a sign of OS X being ready for primetime, then I don't know what is.
In related news, Apple is gearing up to release Mac OS X 10.1.1, a 0.0.1 point release to address a few minor issues. OS X is looking better all the time.
Holy shit! 500 SunRay terminals on a single 4800. I must contact the author and find out how to keep the 4800 from exploding under that kind of load.
... have you ever even used a sunray?
Sun typically ran over 100 SunRays at once with a single e450 with 8 cpu's and 12 gigs ram, repeating this setup for about a dozen servers in the initial rollout. I was not only there, I supported the installations. I ended up ditching my desktop for a SunRay because they really were that fast.
requirement of 25 gigs RAM? no problemo. this isn't a PC you're talking about. slowaris? run ps on a linux box with all the processes of 500 logged in users and you tell me what's slow. you talk a lot about the real world
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I also work at Sun. The SunRays are *very* productive compared to desktops. As I move throughout our building, I simply insert my smartcard in any SunRay and I have my desktop.
... faster.
I think most users tend to forget about concurrency. We sized our SunRay servers based on *real* usage data and concurrency within the environment, and then installed the SunRay servers.
Processor concurrency:
It does not take a 1Ghz box to run a word processor for 98% of the user base. In the NT world, that 1Ghz CPU is being wasted (and paid for) while users are in a meeting, thinking about the next sentence to type, or simply between keystrokes.
RAM concurrency:
If I leave for a meeting, parts of my session might be swapped out to disk so others can utilize the RAM used by my session. It was already mentioned that binaries are shared in memory.
People concurrency:
Our sysadmin manages *many* sun offices across the country. We have no sysadmin in our ~200 user facility. He sits 1000 miles away (literally). We don't need one locally.
Availability:
Its kind of amusing seeing some posts of a user showing an uptime of 48 hours and being proud. Solaris users replace *hours* with *months* in statements like this. If our server runs short on RAM or CPUs, or network bandwidth, our sysadmin can install another N cpus, N GB ram, or N ethernet cards without anyone even noticing except things get
That's a neat trick - the E450 only has 4 CPU slots, and takes a max. of 4GB of RAM...
Here's a real world case study: I have an E450 running SunRays at work:
- E450 with 2x400MHz CPU, 1GB of RAM
- 5 SunRays connected to a 100MBit port*
- Software: QVWM window manager, Netscape, Applix, Z-Mail, Acrobat Reader, GIMP etc.
* This is only a test configuration, but runs very comfortably.I chose QVWM because it is lightweight with a Windows look and feel - it also loads *really* fast. Getting it to work properly with the SunRays was fiddly, but not that hard once I copied the relevant parts from the CDE environment. (There's one script that I've had to leave as ksh - I've tried porting it to csh/Bourne shell but it seems to be doing something really weird...)
The production rollout will be around 25 SunRays via a gigabit connection to the server (100MHz to the desktop), so I'll probably add a couple of CPUs and 2-3GB of RAM to play it safe. (There are around 10 "power" users; the rest will be shared terminals with intermittent usage.)
The server it is replacing is an old Sparc 20 with 2x150MHz Ross CPUs, 384MB of RAM and a bunch of old Labtam X-terminals (8-bit colour only); it's old, it struggles a bit under peak usage but it has worked admirably for years. The switch to 24-bit colour will be a vast improvement - the extra performance is a bonus.