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.""

Comments

It just goes to show ...

[Lemurmania]

Sometimes you want to patch, reboot and repeat. Stability is so *boring*.

not necessarily

[lucas teh geek]

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?

Re:How long

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Unix != Linux

[AntiDragon]

The numbers - they make me sleepy...

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... :D

Re:Article seems misleading

[squiggleslash]

That's correct:

And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.

The major issue here is that GNU/Linux is growing in marketshare.

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.

Re:I have some numbers...

[jimicus]

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?

Free servers

[jamesl]

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.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20051218 /

Maybe not.

Ballmer's Comments on the issue...

[BlueScreenOfTOM]

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.

Re:How long

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How long

[fitten]

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.

No, this is the reason for the shift

[typical]

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.

TV Killed the Radio Star

[Gary W. Longsine]

Years ago we knew that the first casualty of Linux would be the proprietary Unix companies. The workstations first and then the servers.

This seems to be conventional wisdom around these parts, but it's not backed up by evidence. The UNIX vendors that have died to date have nearly all been killed by inept management, including the next one expected to kick off any day now, SGI.

Of course, they had some assistance from early Windows marketing hype and a lazy trade press that believed that Windows would take over the server market in 1992 or 1994 and continued to believe it for over a decade despite overwhelming evidence that the product wasn't ready for the enterprise server room.

And Linux has been taking over the UNIX workstation market? Give me a break. That market has been dead for almost ten years. Windows took over the market niche formerly occupied by UNIX workstations (including X-Windows stations which were not full UNIX boxen) long before Linux was ready, and the market niche doesn't really exist any longer -- it became part of "the Windows Desktop".

Although Linux hasn't killed off any UNIX vendors yet, they appear to be concerned by the possibility. IBM for example has been perfecting their AIX up-selling technique -- hook clients with Linux advertising, then up-sell them to AIX. They have a different term for it, migration analysis or something, which they do free for their customers. (Apparently it works well enough that one IBM group pays cash money to another IBM group to do it, such that the customers don't need to pay for the proposal, which says something like, "Gosh, who wouldda thunk? It turns out that your situation lends itself to an AIX solution after all. Shucks, it's a good thing we did this study or you would have been migrating to Linux and you wouldn't be able to leverage the AIX value proposition" or something like that.) IBM is also hedging its bets by making some more serious investments in Linux, and trying to create a market for Linux on IBM hardware, both Intel and Power based.

Linux has been making inroads into the server market (as you illustrate by example) but it hasn't killed a UNIX vendor there yet. It's also making hay in the embedded systems market. In the process it is displacing some UNIX and some Windows, but also (and perhaps mainly thus far) growing into new areas where there were no dominant players (network linkup boxes were simpletons until fairly recently and didn't run a full operating system like modern switches do, for example). That didn't kill any UNIX vendors, either.

Windows isn't a stationary target, of course. The expected growth of the product in the server market is finally happening, albeit ten years after the fact. This means the market thinks that Windows is an acceptable substitute for many of the former UNIX server tasks. Even if UNIX administrators have plenty of good reasons why it's not, clearly the show stopping problems which prevented its rise for the last ten years are behind it.

The frame of reference seems even to have a waning validity. At the very least, analyzing the question for the past was fairly simple, but it becomes very much more complicated to analyze contemporary events through this lens, since most of the surviving UNIX vendors are also Linux vendors. Things have changed so much in the last several years that events won't make sense when viewed through this lens at all. Allow me to illustrate the problem:

SGI probably sells more Linux than IRIX at this point. If and when SGI hacks up the last bloody phlem and finally dies, which of the following will have occurred?

1. [ ] Windows killed a UNIX vendor
2. [ ] Linux killed a UNIX vendor
3. [ ] management ineptitude killed a UNIX vendor
4. [ ] Windows killed a Linux vendor

Hint: All of the above.