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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."
You'd think that the United Federation of Planets would pick one and stick with it...
Read the article. There's a graph with some stats on Windows vs the two Linux distros, but it's not a comparison between all three - only between the two Linux distros. The last page makes it pretty clear when they only rate the two Linux distros, and Red Hat wins that comparison.
This is *not* a long-awaited comparison between Windows and Linux. It's not even a long-awaited comparison between Linux distros - the whole article spans a whopping three pages, and it's woefully incomplete.
What's your damage, Heather?
Will all thes eoperating systems also have the voice of Majel Roddenberry?
I think NOT!
According to note at the bottom of the article, the results for Windows Server 2003 came from a previous test (I didn't bother to try and search for it, asthey didn't provide a direct link). It would seem that the comparison would be more valid if the tests were all done at the same time, or at least on the same hardware and have some statement to that effect.
I'm not trying to knock on the test, but just pointing out that even smal changes in hardware components or settings can make a big difference.
Otherwise, it looks like a good and thourough test.
This isn't a Red Hat vs. UnitedLinux vs. Windows review. The declare Red Hat the victor over UnitedLinux. The compare some things, such as max tcp connections and file transfer times against Windows, but never do they declare that Red Hat has better hardware support or is easier to configure than Windows.
get nemulator
Well, among others they definitely missed OS X Server.
Even though it would be "fun" to see a comparison between Linux and Windows, I don't think it really could and should be done. Mr. Gates and Company would like for us to think that it is a viable solution to everything but honestly, as we all have discovered, there is no silver bullet. So what Windows may be good at something Linux may suffer at and vice verca. Now to know each ones strengths is truely valuable.
However what the article does with the two linux distros is good. Now we are comparing two OSes designed for the same general tasks and let them duke it out.
But in the end, I would like to see some list of strengths.
One never knows whether a journalist/reviewer/linux-advocate really understands what an "enterprise"-ready OS is. For the purpose of this post, I'm not arguing whether Linux is or isn't one. But I had to laugh after seeing a chart showing "Successful transactions per second" and doublechecking their footnoted definition of transactions.
OLTP? Database? TPC-C? No. A transaction was downloading 20 4k-byte files.
--LP
I think they can justify it. I mean, when you're used to paying almost $3,800 for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with 25 CALs, $2,500 (and no CALs) sounds pretty good!
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
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
That's true enough, but if you're designing an enterprise system, you're going to want to use whatever's best.
A more comprehensive set of tests may have shown that, in fact, Windows 2003 Server is best, at least ignoring cost, licensing, etc. Without making this "apples and oranges" comparison, you don't know.
I support open source as much as the next person, but I also support using the best tool for the job.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Enterprise distos are all about clustering and load distribution, but these tests are caried out on single machines. What is the point?
--signed: Deanna Troi
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Since when three pages are enough for enterprise os comparison?
Good spoiler right at the end of the article synopsis... Totally ruined my urge to RTFA. At least you didn't spit out some nonsense about Harry Potter dying at the end of Matrix Revolutions
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
No, Debian is not enterprise ready. To be enterprise ready they need ISV and OEM support like RedHat has but more importantly, they need a company that would provide enterprise-class support AND release engineering for the OS similar to what RedHat does with their AS/ES/WS product line.
Why didn't they include any Enterprise Operating Systems in their comparison of "Enterprise Operating Systems"?
I mean, like Solaris or AIX.
And also not act like insufferable pricks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What is this reviewer smoking? Statements such as,
The wizard worked well and mostly made astute choices, although it divided our disk arrays into seemingly bite-sized devices with seven partitions. By contrast, the UnitedLinux distributions divided the two disks we used into larger chunks, which is a better way to reserve server space for future operations.
Shows that Tom Henderson doesn't know what he's talking about. How could anybody think that one large partition is better than lots of smaller ones. If one is consentrating on enterprise level systems one would be using LVM and have lots of partitions so they could add drives as they go and increase the partition sizes on the fly.
$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)
This isn't to say that the conclusion is wrong - it may be entirely correct. It's just to say that I get pissed off by pointless "scoring systems" that are apparently objective (they're numbers...) but are actually completely subjective and just intended to give a spurious authenticity to the conclusion. If they said "We think Red Hat's security is better and that's a reason to prefer it", fine.
And if you don't understand why a result based on a scoring system where the difference in scores is less than the expected uncertainty of the result is not valid, then what are you doing trying to benchmark a technical product?
Oh well, rant over for now.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Two Linux distros and Windows doesn't exactly constitute a good sampling of "Enterprise" operating systems. I'd have thought they'd pick one Linux, Windows, and say, Solaris. Or HPUX or AIX or SOME other OS that's been used heavily on servers. Hell, even VMS and OS/390 would qualify.
But I didn't read the article. Yeah, I know. Flame me. I'm sure they have their reasons for such a small sampling.
WTF is an "enterprise" anyway? Oooooh, a really big and important company with really important computer needs...?
"Enterprise" is the edition of Microsoft you buy if you've got far too much money and you want all the features enabled, I know that much.
But "Enterprise" ? WTF? And SME- small to medium enterprise ? Whoah, it's like a really big company except it's small... What?!
Oh, I've got it now- "Enterprise" is a way of describing computer systems or companies so I know in advance that they're really boring and have nothing to do with flashy graphics or fun technologies. It's an enterprise-ready mail-server! (Yawn).
graspee
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 ?
This is one of the silliest assertions of numbers I have seen. It might be true if the comparison were Linux versus Windows, and you were rolling dice to determine the outcome, in which case the comparison is useless. If it is a valid comparison, it takes only one to win, and you can add all the inferior ones you want, and it does not affect the chances of the winner winning. It is not the preponderance of similar entries that makes that sort of entry likely to win.
Had you read the article, you would find that Windows was not being compared at all. Oh my, a rigged comparison where only Linux could win. And the Formula 1 is rigged so that only cars can win, no bicycles or NASA spacecraft... how sad!
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.
Anyway, I'd like to see a comparison for the major players of the real enterprise OS market: z/OS, OpenVMS, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, and HP/UX.
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.
They are talking here about small server environments rather than Enterprise IMO. This is not done by the sort of people who could size up a Data Warehouse or an SAP solution. I mean do I care about the download speed ?
OS/390, AS400, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX those are what the Enterprise runs on. The Web-site however has a choice. Yes I know that you can run Linux or Windows under SAP if you want to but this was not a comparison that matters to the enterprise.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Spoken like a true zealot who probably hasn't written anything above a "Hello World," and in bash script no less.
Those products didn't just stop working. You were never forced to upgrade. If you want the new features of the new products, then you upgrade. I've seen plenty of WinNT 3.51 and MS-DOS solutions still chugging along just fine.
Yes, "anyone with a brain," obviously they can understand several million lines of source code with a glance and be able to fix logical errors or hack on new features within minutes. Bzzt! Wrong! Can you get someone to hack at it? Sure. Is that qualified support that you can trust on? No, especially in the mind of a business.
You might want to check out open source in the enterprise. Vendors providing Linux solutions also enforce support lifecycles. You won't find published material on any version of Redhat Linux prior to 7.1 on their website. Can you call and get support for prior versions? Sure, but it'll cost you, and if you want the new spiffies that they've brought out in newer versions be prepared to upgrade. Or you can pay that kid to Redhat's altered KDE 3.x onto the Linux kernel 1.0. But then you're right back to praying again, but this time who are you gonna call when it doesn't work?
When you grow up and learn what the word "enterprise" means, maybe we can talk again. In the meantime, yes, I would like fries with that.
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
Well we could always go to the "pinball score inflation system".
As you can see windows is very good for a desktop operating sytem, which gives it another 8 million points. KDE on Linux while not being perfect also did quite well so it only scored 2 million below windows. Emacs comes in at a low score of 3 million total as a desktop operating sytem. In our next review we will be showing the differences between file servers... as soon as our point system is upgraded to a 64 bit processor
I thought the title said Enterprise OS. All of the >$10 Billion/year companies I've written software for run *nix on Sun and/or *nix and/or an IBM OS on medium to big iron. They are not running Windows as an "Enterprise" platform.
I'm not talking email servers where a few poor sap CIOs got talked into running Exchange farms, or similar unfortunate tragedies with IIS, I'm talking the ERP stuff that runs the factory, accounting, payroll, and other stuff people have to bet their businesses on.
I realize OS/390 and Windoze are apples and oranges, but come one, they said ENTERPRISE. Now if they mean "Enterprise" as 2 guys and a van and a laptop, then hell yeah bring on the Windows. Otherwise, it's like having a review of the world's fastest street cars pitting Acura vs. Mazda vs. Toyota. The Lamborghini and Ferrari folks are tapping their feet and rolling their eyes. Put DB2 on an S/390 and on the bitchinest Windows box you can get your hands on, then do the test. I dare you.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
This is an interesting test that I haven't seen done before. Interesting to note that Suse took much longer to reply to the emails, although the article doesn't mention if the Suse support people are located in Germany, and if the time zone difference could be the cause. Red Hat's more detailed responses sounds like a plus, though. Although I would like to have seen the actual questions and responses. Anyway, this sort of thing is important for a company like mine, where we use Linux, but can't (or won't) afford 24/7 support (I should mention that Linux isn't a primary platform here, we do have 24/7 vendor support for our mission critical systems). So getting a quick response on emails is a big selling feature.
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.
Or a KVM port, but either way you are likely to be winding up with additional hardware for Windows. How easy is it to operate a Windows server with just a power and network lead plugged into it...
WTF? Nice to see that the Novell was once again left out of the testing. Why don't you Linux Zealots try and broaden your horizons. After all the recent Novell is "Linux's best friend" posts the last couple weeks and still they get no respect. Novell would rape your Linux in such testing. Also Novell is now giving away 5 user Small Business Licenses. You have to jump through some hoops to be able to get your hands on it, but it is pretty painless. Novell is by far the best NOS out there, it is mature, stable (600+ day uptimes any one), and has great applications. Also most if not all on Novell'a apps run on UNIX, Netware, Linux and Windows.
For the love of god Linux is not the end all be all of NOS, if you hate M$ that much (I do) look at all the alternatives. Free does not make it better.
Friendly
This might be a stupid post to make, but doesn't Linux bypass the BIOS? Just curious.
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
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
Really? Three "Enterprise" OS? RedHat, UnitedLinux and Windows?
Bah!
None of them are really ready for the enterprise. What if they compared Unix (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) with z/OS (MVS) or OS/400?
Linux and Windows are still condenders, imho. They have their uses in parts of an "Enterprise", but are any of them ready to kick out the operating systems that sits at the heart of todays very large corporations?
//TheToon