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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.""
Linux beats it in hardware support, but Sun has the whole overpriced reliability image which some might find attractive. If you're paying the big bucks you can get a good response from Sun, though I'd suspect people working on Linux could make those bucks go further.
Or expand with UNIX -- BSD and Solaris both do fine on commodity hardware. And are cleaner setups than either Windows or any Linux distro that isn't stripped down.
-b.
A place I used to work planned to move everyone from sun workstations to windows boxes as a cost-cutting exercise.
It ended up costing way more overall because all of a sudden our IT department went from a single sysadmin who was hardly ever busy, because everything just worked, to a whole department of IT staff needed to second-guess MS exchange and a now very unreliable network (even though no network hardware or configuration had changed), and Windows PC's that were always slowing up or crashing, especially after that stupid automated windows update.
Anyone who conflates "Unix" and "large, expensive custom/proprietary hardware" in 2007 isn't worth reading. While there are indeed some Unix operating systems that only run on custom hardware produced by the same vendor, that's by no means universally true. Note especially Solaris, which runs just as well on the very same cheap and ubiquitous x86 (whether from a tier-1 vendor or homebrew) systems used by some to run Windows or GNU/Linux as it does on the big, expensive SPARC hardware that Sun and Fujitsu offer. Anyone who wants to have a meaningful conversation about the IT industry needs to start by separating the hardware options (driven mainly by economics) from the software discussion (driven mainly by technical and business factors). While there are business problems that can only be solved on high-end hardware that's often limited to a single choice of OS, those are the minority of deployments and form a distinct market from the volume space. Talking about competition between high-end and low-end solutions is pointless; either you need high-end performance, capacity, and features or you don't. If you do, you're simply not in the market for a low-end hardware platform and the OS you run will depend largely on the hardware vendor you choose. If you don't, it would be silly to spend money on high-end gear, and you'll be able to choose from among several operating systems - including those named here - based on your individual business needs and the features offered by each product. But it's a sure mark of ignorance to discuss the two as if it's all one market in which a choice of Windows/GNU/Linux/Solaris/BSD on a uniprocessor PC competes directly with HPUX on Himalaya and Solaris on Starcat. One can see why commentators are always talking about Unix's imminent demise; they fail to recognise two key aspects of the market: Unix's strong and capable presence on both low-end and high-end hardware, and the segmented nature of the server market. Not much to see here, I shouldn't think.
The sheer ease of starting a business with Linux and other open-source technologies (MySQL, PHP, ruby, etc) gives Linux the the advantage over Unix. If the company grows, we will just keep using what works.
I am currently working in a 10-man startup company that delivers employment training over the Web. Our system runs off a cluster of 3 boxes in a LAMP configuration, and we never paid a dime for server software.
Linux dedicated hosting is much cheaper than Windows dedicated hosting, and there are so many tutorials and packages out there that make it really easy to learn and deploy open-source systems.
Sun and company have started their battle way too late for anything but niche deployments -- the King of "Big Iron", IBM, long ago threw in the mainframe towel in favor of Linux.
My Dad used to run a university library, and he was always very forward - looking in terms of IT. He wanted to get a Sun server to run thin-client systems for the library patrons to use rather than having to clean the Windows systems every day, and he could not get a Sun salesperson to talk to him (this was about 12 years ago).
The main library software ran on Sun servers (that they bought through the software vendor), and he was highly impressed with the stability of the Sun boxes. He was so impressed that when the time came for PC's to be installed in the library, he wanted to put 20 thin-client terminals in that ran sessions on a second Sun server. That plan ended because he could not get Sun to talk to him -- he literally could not get the sales people there to call him back to sell him the system.
The end result was that he had to install the 20 PC's and deal with the viruses, downloaded software and other daily headaches of the Windows world and Sun lost an easy sale because they were too arrogant to care.
Sun should have been fighting way back then -- Linux is way too mature now, and way too cheap and easy to deploy. In these days of Ubuntu livecd's and Macs running on top of Linux, anyone who is not a Windows person who is interested in computing will learn Linux. Sun may have a few legacy apps, it looks like they will just be a niche player at best. Sun was legendary for their stability, but our Linux boxes have all the stability we need.
I am sure Unix will have it's niches here and there, but Linux is way too strong at this point.