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USA Today says "Linux waddles from obscurity"
JCallery writes "The Money section of Monday's USA Today carried a feature article entitled "Linux waddles from obscurity to the big time Momentum builds as upstart operating system proves it can compute". It carries a discussion of time and monetary savings in business, basic Sun and Microsoft arguments against Linux, growing popularity with Wall Street, Hollywood, and government organizations, and the credibility of Linux due to alliances with other industry companies."
The Unix servers took 17 hours to calculate how much cash the bank needed in reserve to offset its investment risk. The Linux servers made the same calculation in 11 minutes.
What they'd do, upgrade from 20mhz Sun boxes to Pentium III 933's?
These kind of performance comparisons are just SILLY
The idea of loading up an unsupported OS from download
I'm an IT manager and it doesn't make me nervous. I can purchase a CD set of RedHat 7.x with whatever level of support I want. I can purchase one copy of it and install it on ALL of my PC's and servers. That means I can purchase all of my computer equipment that will run Linux with no OS installed, saving anywhere from $100 to $10,000 on the price of the equipment.
Get the facts a bit straighter
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
This article isn't for us. It is for our bosses, and their bosses, and so on and so on. It is a momentum builder. So the next time you mention Linux, instead of blank stares, your boss will dig into his memory and find a positive image of Linux as a REAL OS, and it will be a little easier to get him/her to go with your suggestion to use our OS of choice.
Use this article for what it is, and don't complian about what it isn't.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Go price an Sun 450 with 4 processors. Then price an equivalent Dell/Compaq. ...
Sun should know better.
Interesting thing is, I would still take the Sun E450, since Dell or Compaq don't sell an equivalent machine. The 450 will hold five independent SCSI controllers for 20 drives. All in one enclosure. It's also robust as hell. They don't have to cost more than $10,000, either, if you find a good used one. Plus, once you find out just how much work an E450 can do, it just might be the only server you need for much of a small company's infrastructure.
Sun competes on things beyond price/performance. Consistency and reliability are one such thing. A more balanced architecture is another (576-bit memory busses, SCSI/FC-AL standard, large CPU caches). Well-engineered enclosures is another. I would also bet that each Sun server design goes through much more testing and quality control than most Intel-based servers (I've read that the UltraSPARC CPUs have a very low errata rate relative to Intel CPUs).
Sun still makes a strong case for itself in its markets. In some ways the prices can be hard to stomach, but, if a company is to the point of affording a real IT infrastructure, they should be as concerned about risk as much as they are up-front cost. Sun equipment tends to be low-risk and very long-lived. It is somewhat harder to claim this for Intel-server Brand X, although I'm sure there are a handful of winners out there.
A lot of these arguments apply to IBM (Power), SGI (MIPS), and other hard-core UNIX server companies as well. The prices vary pretty widely, but they all share a core quality that makes them worthwhile as a long-term investment.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin