Slashdot Mirror
Three Enterprise Operating Systems Compared
Anonymous Coward writes "Finally, a much awaited review of enterprise OSes. The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted
Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin on the basis of its high hardware compatibility and strong security integration."
isn't debian enterprise ready?
A nicer comparison would be Suse, Mac OS X Server, and Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin
/that/ would be much more interesting IMHO ...
So, they compared RH (Linux), UnitedLinux (Linux again) against Windows (not Linux). Guess which OS has 66% chances of winning, given that, honestly, modern Linux distros and Windows are very close in features and user friendliness ?
What's more, for one such comparison test where a Linux distro wins that gets posted on Slashdot, how many get ignored my Taco & Co because the Windows OS wins and not Linux ?
Finally, I would have much preferred a Windows vs RH vs MacOS X review : see, I don't plan on buying a Mac, but I'd like someone to describe OS X to me and compare them to similar KDE or Windows features, for example. Yes, I know they don't run on the same platforms (well, RH could) but I'd like to see a detailed comparison chart with Windows, RH and MacOS X compatibility ratings and desktop features/ease of use. Now
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
$2500 for NetWare 6 + Upgrade Protection for a 50 user 'upgrade' license. That includes a 2 node 'Cluster'. (File level connection failover).
You'd think 'NW' would throw NetWare in there :P Especially now that NAMP (Netware + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl) is now standard with Netware 6.5. So out of the box, you have failover ('clustering') support for everything from the standard Apache/MySQL to file-level reconnection.
Most people don't know this, but failover can be done with a single SCSI drive, and 2 PC's with SCSI controllers all on seperate SCSI ID's. It's a poor-man's 'cluster'.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Depends on who your engineers are.
I'd have to sit down and "RTFM" for many hours to get anything running on windows. On any Unix variant, there's much less for me to figure out.
The windows solutions are as hard to use at this point, it's just a matter of what you already are familiar with. The windows way of managing servers seems optimized for keyboard and mouse at each server, much different from the unix setup which is optimized for text usage and much more scriptable.
I am personally much more comfortable making changes across 150 Unix machines then across 150 windows machines, and that's the sort of enterprise class applications I've worked with.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I don't see any BSD in the review. Does it mean that BSD is no more enterprise ready?
Less is more !
Absolutely. I agree with you 100 percent. It depends upon your (staff's) experience. Although, it's *nix I have to sit down and RTFM for.
meh.
I was at the Windows 2003 launch in NY, and the dude giving the presentation touched briefly on Linux (it was very interesting, actually - he certainly didn't dwell on it, was basically dismissive). They did show some benchmarks (against Redhat 5, oddly enough) but the impression given was that they aren't interested in competing in a pure performance arena. He was hyping Windows 2003 as an end-to-end solution, because of all the bundled middleware and groupware and whatnot. And lets be honest, if thats what you want, Linux isn't going to provide it - certainly not out of the box.
I never once met any person with sound Unix and/or Linux knowledge that couldn't point-and-click their way through Windows administration (I've worked with at least 20 said individuals over time). Winodws is not very powerful, and hence, it provides a person with very little in terms of administration and configuration. Windows admins are 99.9% of the time far behind Unix and Linux admins in terms of overall IT competency. Everyone in the industry knows this, this is why Unix and Linux admins make more money are more often multi-tasked (network admin slash database admin, or network admin slash web programmer). The most incompetent IT workers that I ever met were (in order of incompetence):
4. An MCSE course instructor and his assistant, both were equally woefully ignorant of any real IT knowledge. For crying out loud, neither could ever operate a switch (yes, just a mere switch) that we provided them for internet connectivity for their classroom. Three or four students dropped out of their class after watching me have to help THE INSTRUCTORS solve simple problems that arose with their Win2K servers.
3. A "server engineer" at a local college
2. This admin at a local bank (he was so dense that he thought Windows clients couldn't print to a printer if the print server was Unix or Linux)
1. My old boss, who was a Netware and Microsoft admin - we had to clean up his messes daily
Who told you they didn't have multitasking? I've been runnng multiple prgorams at once on Macs since System 7 days. IIRC, Multi-finder was in 6, but can't remember what exactly i did and whether it qualified as multi-tasking.
I think that waht you meant to say is that they didn't have pre-emptive multi-tasking. Co-operative is still a version of multitasking however and, in some circumstances (though not many) better than pre-emptive. I'm much happier with pre-emptive, however, as the majority of the world likely is.
Or maybe you meant protected memory which would be a very valid point to join up and down and scream about. I was in denial about the problem for years. Used to be that an application crashed and until you restarted the computer, you'd be really nervous about something going horribly wrong after that. Now, an application crashes and you just restart that app. Don't remember the last time I had to restart for any reason other than a system update.
Windows is a great platform for getting a full network setup. Fresh from the install, you can get most network services configured and running very quickly.
Where Windows breaks down is in flexibility. As soon as you want to do something slightly differently than MS expects you to, you run into a brick wall. If you're lucky, there's a company that's already developed a solution to do what you want, although it will likely cost you a fair chunk of change.
With Linux, it takes more work to set things up, but the result is (usually) that you understand everything a whole lot better. When there's a problem, you can track it down a lot faster. If you want to do something differently than most people, and there's not already an option for it, then you're a lot more likely to find an OSS solution that fits or is close, and you can modify it to work, and contribute back your changes. If all else fails, you have the source code to tweak, which is a lot easier than trying to figure out MS's APIs and how to hook in to do what you want. Of course, that's assuming the API calls you need are even documented..
Speak before you think