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Unix Vendors Get Creative Against Windows & Linux
coondoggie writes "As x86 servers become increasingly capable, IT managers are taking a closer look at their Unix installations to determine whether a move to Linux or Windows might make sense, analysts say. "The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, mission-critical application, which is usually some type of database serving," says Andrew Butler, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "But increasingly, the appeal of Windows- and Linux-based systems running on cheaper, commodity hardware is becoming more and more compelling.""
I've worked on some huge Unix systems (mostly for databases) and never once did anyone mention Windows without laughing. No way are people with truely large-scale critical Unix servers considering switching to Windows. When you already own the hardware, paid for the software, and have huge support contracts, consider expansion with Linux. Windows is only intruding on the smaller scale Unix installations.
Gartner is known for sometimes putting out some fluff but this just sounds silly.
Developers: We can use your help.
linux [...] comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use?
Either it's easier to use (in which case the learning curve isn't as steep as you claim), or it's not (in which case there's no misconceptions, only reality).
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I beg to differ. Here where I work, our main customer database (which is OLTP, NOT a data warehouse) just crossed over the 20TB mark. Our data warehouse is up in the hundreds of TB range, and growing very quickly.
Like all things with technology, as things progress and get larger and faster, people find ways to use that new power.
There is a _large_ market for high end systems. We're talking 32+ processors and TERABYTES of RAM. Commodity hardware has increased in power and flexibility, but the big Iron has as well.
I've been using linux since '95ish (slackware something or other installed from floppies). I've been using solaris since '97 (2.5.1).
On the topic of servers, if given a choice of what to run on x64 hardware, its Solaris 10, hands down. Device management is much easier, kernel modules are a snap to deal with (no recompile with each kernel upgrade), folks dont change schedulers as part of minor patch releases, stable API's, etc, etc. Toss in things like zones and dtrace and I'm sold (and no, uml and strace are not the same). I usually dont need crazy hardware support on my servers, just fibre channel and AMD cpu's, so the "better hardware support" of linux does not buy me anything. These are servers, not toys in my basement. When they go down, I have 1000 people calling me and yelling. Its not worth the $250 savings to go with an off-brand NIC or anything other than a qlogic FC card.
Now, on the desktop, its linux. There availability of destop apps and hardware drivers for strange things that just work are much better (acrobat, firefox, flash, etc).
To make things even more interesting, if you want support, Solaris is actually cheaper (compared to redhat). Dont need support? Then they both cost the same.
I'm in the process of moving our Oracle environment from Solaris SPARC to Solaris x86/64 on a mix of Sun x4200's and HP 585's (or Sun x4600's if I can torture the sales rep enough). It involves about 60+ oracle instances that will be moved onto 4 systems. I know that solaris can deal with the load of 1000 procs all running at the same time.
FYI, OS X Leopard *is* Unix, it's been offically certified as such and will be marketed as such, unlike the previous versions which were 'Unix Like'
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use? Actually that is fine. Initially, linux can have a steep learning curve (first week or two) but after that it is easy. Windows admins have to misconception it starts difficult and stays difficult.