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Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS
Ivan writes "
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.""
This probably reflects the massive number of smaller servers that are out there, which often have Windows installed. In our organization, Windows servers tend to have a single application on them (typically by request of the vendor), while our Unix and AS/400 servers tend to have dozens of applications on them.
The irony is that Windows applications often "don't play well together", making it almost a requirement that they get a dedicated piece of hardware. As a reward for this problem, their rankings are boosted.
Sometimes you want to patch, reboot and repeat. Stability is so *boring*.
doesnt this really just suggest that windows servers need regular replacing to keep doing their job while old unix hardware keeps doing its job just fine?
TIAEAE!
Maybe Windows servers just got more expensive, or Unix servers got less expensive. Perhaps a better study would talk about volume or usage -- or longevity. Perhaps Unix servers from 2002 simply lasted longer than Windows servers, so the companies using Unix didn't have to upgrade after 3 years.
The numbers - they make me sleepy...
:D
But note that the article mentions the growth of both Linux _and_ Windows. This is really about the ongoing decline of pure UNIX mainfarmes - something we've all been aware of for years.
The fact that Windows OS now outnumbers UNIX boxes is neither suprising nor noteworthy. They've been chipping away at the server market for ages. Bound to happen eventually.
But what I would be more interested in is out of all these switchers, what's the ratio that switch to Linux compared to Windows? Linux growth is faster (Upgrades along the Windows path don't count, we're talking complete platform migration) I believe. But naturally the title of the article gives enough bias to encourage readers to miss that little tidbit. Or maybe using the phrase "Windows beats Unix" is the journalistic equivalent of shouting "Fire!" when it comes to grabbbing attention...
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
I guess the cause is probably somewhere in between.
Probably worth adding that in many shops I know, every new server-type application that requires Windows gets its own Windows box, whereas people seem to understand the concept of "multitasking" with Unix and GNU based platforms, which is another thing that probably distorts the figures. That is, suppose my employer sells "StatisticStats" to Target, WalMart, and K-Mart. If we've written it as a web application, we'll deploy it one-(or-more)-CPUs-per-customer with all three (ie three servers) if we're doing it under IIS, whereas we'll centralize it unless it really starts becoming a resource hog if we deploy it under GNU/Linux.
I don't really understand why, except in that Windows does a lot to hide the underlying system to the point that it becomes easier just to throw a new box at each job than spend the time getting the different parts to work. It shouldn't be like this, IIS is pretty versatile, it just... is.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It seems like this study gets published about every two weeks on Slashdot, and everyone has misconceptions about it.
The funny thing is that people's reactions are entirely based on the headline. If Slashdot runs the story as "Linux Server Revenue Up!", half the comments are about Microsoft going out of business or whatever. If they run the larger Windows numbers in the headline, everyone complains.
Anyway -- Here's a laundry list of objections that will no doubt appear:
+ This study doesn't count the servers I have running Gentoo/Debian/etc
-- Most of the revenue reported is actually hardware, so yes it does
+ How would they know what I'm running on my servers? I didn't get a preinstalled OS
-- User surveys, statistical methods, etc. It's not an exact count.
+ My *nix servers have 234 CPUs and run more applications than my Windows servers
-- Because the survey counts $$$ and not CPU or box counts, this sorta works itself out, but I guess this is valid.
+ We put Linux on our i486-33 Servers
-- Who cares? IDC doesn't, they're counting new server revenue.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
We purchased five brand new Dell rackmountable servers last month. When we got them, we burned in some linux and threw the windows disks in the trash...
Seeing as Dell doesn't force you to buy an operating system with their servers, why did you bother buying them in the first place?
Microsoft actually makes products designed for small businesses and storefront integration shops, whereas Linux distributors focus almost exclusively on the Enterprise Fortune 500 market. MS-SBS is pretty much a "install-and-go" type product for single-server environments, There's also tons of training and marketing support for the integrator.
I don't think there's any equivalent in the Linux world that doesn't require a lot of *nix talent for customization. (And the actual amount of *nix talent in the small biz market is practically zero.)
So, as long as the Linux world is so focused on Wall Street, it shouldn't be a suprise that Windows is outselling them on Main Street.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Maybe its because Sun is giving away servers. For free. No cost. And each free server would add ... let me think ... ummm ... zero dollars to the total.8 /
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/2005121
Maybe not.
Microsoft's success on the server side was unavoidable for a number of reasons:
.NET platform. They can acquire alot of smart people who will do good work for them.
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
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Upon hearing the news, Steve Ballmer was happy to hear that his long-thought-out plan to Fucking Kill(TM) UNIX was well underway. When he asked what was next, his advisers told him he'd have to wait, as the database of things to Fucking Kill(TM) had grown too large for Windows to handle so it had to be converted to a UNIX box.
Steve Ballmer is now in the process of Fucking Kill(TM)ing his entire staff.
I buy servers for my company all the time. A proprietry Unix box costs between 6 and 60 times as much as the average Intel box. Whether the Intel box has Windows or Linux makes no difference - we pay for both, and it is an insignificant slice of the cost.
How many Windows boxes where replaced with Linux last year where I work? Answer: None. How many Unix systems where replaced with Linux? Answer: Hundreds.
This is why Windows/Linux eats into HP-UX/AIX/Solaris market share.
The idea here is sales. This does not talk about usage, swithing, or anything else.
So, all of the free downloads and installs are not counted here. Windows had a lot of sales, unix lost some and Linux increased in sales. That's dollars and cents not usage.
With all of the free solaris downloads, linux downloads, and BSD downloads it's no suprise that unix purchases are going down. Why pay for it if you can get it free?
Evolution or ID?
How about the 12 servers we bought from dell without an OS that had linux installed on them? I know those were not counted. Or the 100+ servers acting as mpeg2 video routers in the headends that were also bought without an OS that has linux installed as well.
I bet the number of intel based servers without an OS sold is far greater than the number sold with an OS.
Unless they release ALL the data it's a worthless study. have dell release all server sales with and without OS. without OS will dominate nearly 2 to 1.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Linux was listed in the ranking seperately (it came third, according to the article). Linux is not UNIX, so even if you bought it with Linux installed, it wouldn't have changed the relative positions of the two operating systems.
I agree that Linux would have come higher if the eventual OS installs of servers with no OS installs had been recorded, though.
Perhaps a better study would talk about volume or usage -- or longevity.
Why would a market share report, whose audience is investors, want to report on that?
Sure, Unix boxes last longer... plenty of studies have established that... but these people are tracking sales figures.
This is why Windows/Linux eats into HP-UX/AIX/Solaris market share.
Years ago we knew that the first casualty of Linux would be the proprietary Unix companies. The workstations first and then the servers. Although Linux is advocated as a Windows replacement most of the time, it's an even better Unix replacement. As Linux improves, it will just hurt Unix more. A friend works at a place where they've replaced almost all their Sun servers with Linux servers except the cluster of V880s that they have to still run certain software packages (Solaris only binaries). I could easily see them replacing those boxes with multi-cpu/core Opteron boxes (maybe even from Sun) running Linux if they had that software available. This is a place that has purchased multiple Sun E10Ks and multiple SGI O2Ks and the like in the past. Now, they are mostly Linux except where they have entrenched software or have issues where they need large systems (32p and 64p) and Linux doesn't work on them for some reason or work well on them.
The researchers claim to have adjusted for that effect. Most servers are sold without an O/S because even machines bought as Windows boxes are likely to have the O/S loaded under a site license.
The non-Linux market for UNIX continues to shrink. As it does machines move from expensive proprietary platforms like HP, Sun or AIX to commodity Intel/AMD boxes. This means that Linux is effectively handicapped against the traditional UNIX varieties in this race, as is Microsoft of course.
Servers have been getting cheaper for years, the server market changes as a result. Forty years ago servers were mostly $1 million plus mainframes. Today its a definition thing, you can buy a 'server' for $100 in Frys and hang a printer off it.
All the growth in the market comes at the bottom end as small businesses start to invest in infrastructure. A law office with ten employees using Windows XP is going to buy a Windows server, end of story. An ISP with 100 Linux boxes doing hosted web is going to buy Linux for machines 101, 102,...
I don't think the survey is actually measuring real transitions. There is no compelling reason to move from Linux to Windows or from Windows to Linux if you have installed base. There is a huge cost incentive to move from proprietary UNIX to Linux. There is also a major incentive to introduce Windows Server systems to provide support infrastructure for networks of Windows machines.
There are relatively few areas of overlap between Windows and Linux. Both can host Web sites, but once you have developed active server pages you are locked into Windows. Both can host a mail server, but people do not buy Exchange as just a mail server, the calendar features are the real value.
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Look at the numbers. They are *dollar values*. They are not "number of installed servers this year". There's a reason for that.
You know whose lunch Linux has been eating? Solaris's. AIX's. HP/UX's.
You know how much a typical Solaris deployment with commercial servers would have cost? Right. $$$.
You know how much a typical *Linux* server costs? Right. In most cases, nothing. Sure, you can get Red Hat Enterprise and use a commercial Apache replacement and a commercial ssh, but that isn't what most Linux servers I'm aware of are running.
This has been making the dollar size of the market drop like a stone. That says nothing about amount of deployments. That just says that Sun and friends are bringing a lot less money home than they used to, and it's staying with the people who are using the servers.
"Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS"? Hardly. "Windows Bumps Unix as Most Expensive Server OS", perhaps.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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