Michael Dell says Linux Server Sales are Up

00_NOP writes "Linux is growing faster in the server space than Windows says the Dell CEO 'On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down.'"

Comments

Re:Guess he wants cheaper OEM licenses

[ivan256]

That article is talking desktops.

I'm sure that the "tax" is much higher for servers, depending on which variety of Windows Server you get, and how many licenses you add.

Re:How will this news affect Apache?

[Tantris]

It looks as though Security Space visits a fraction of the number that netcraft does. If you look at this quote from Security Space:

What sites do you visit?

We visit what we consider well-known sites. In our case, we define a well-known site as a site that had a link to it from at least one other site that we consider well-known. So, if we are visiting you, it means we know about you through a link from another site.

If a site stops responding to our request for 3 consecutive months, we automatically remove it from the survey. In this fashion, our list of known servers remains up to date.

Because of this technique, we find that we actually only visit about 10% of the web sites out on the web. This is because approximately 90% of all web sites are "fringe" sites, such as domain squatters, personal web sites, etc., that are considered unimportant by the rest of the web community (because no-one considers them important enough to link to.)

It is possible IIS is really upping their market share using domain squatters and personal web pages. I would see Security Space as having a better methodology, as the web sites that are really important on the internet are more interesting than just random numbers. That is just my opinion though, both seem to show interesting information. I seem to remember one of the big web hosting companies(GoDaddy?) switching to having all unused domains and the default(mostly static) new sites hosted on IIS. That made a big hit in the Netcraft report, but honestly, is just kind of silly numbers games. I imagine they got some money to do it from Microsoft. I wonder if every single Livejournal account gets a domain. That would be a fairly large number of domains, that are in essence meaningless.

Re:Are they actually running Linux?

[MikeBabcock]

Dell's server configuration screens and forms have options for each version of Windows to pre-install, or Linux to pre-install, or whether its without an OS for Linux, or just no OS.

The "No OS Pre-installed - Linux" option is important, because it makes sure the hardware is compatible with Linux in general.

Re:And this is news?

[somersault]

True, the grandparent poster obviously doesn't use Linux in a professional environment.. the costs of this stuff sound a lot from a home point of view, but in business then you tend to get what you pay for. I wanted to move to using towards using all Linux servers, but realised it's not really worth it since the whole organisation is already setup and stable with a Windows domain / Exchange server (which I realised is actually a pretty decent product, after I tried setting up OpenExchange and using it as a domain controller/exchange server - it was lacking in functionality and the configuration was a real pain in the ass too due to the fairly lacklustre documentation on LDAP setup, which I'd never done before, took me a week or 2 to get it right.. :( ). I'm very happy with the way vendors/customers are warming up to Linux in the server and desktop world, but for the moment I'm still waiting for a killer Exchange/Outlook replacement (not lots of separate servers/clients for calendars, email, groupware etc..), or at least just an Outlook replacement. That's more because of my own wishes, because while it will save a fair bit of money in the long run, it's still pretty small fry for a medium sized business unfortunately

Re:How does this coincide with security costs?

[guruevi]

The '20%' security model is imho just a load of bull from security vendors. Ever try reading those free magazines you get because you're an IT person? They're loaded with stuff like security programs that cost >100k per license and that don't ever offer more than an equivalent to Tripwire or a decently set up IPTables firewall.

Sure it's got a nice interface, but out of experience I know those companies only sell 10-100 initial licenses and some 'consulting' then the whole 10 programmers and 2 managers of the company split the profits and go on to another venture. When after about a year of messing around with it, it still doesn't work at the client, the whole company already cleared out.

Some companies dare to stay in business to resell consulting to their clients where gullible managers that are afraid to admit mistake keep buying into the magic mushrooms. Yes, I'm talking about you Peoplesoft, Microsoft and Infor. Really, did you ever notice non of those expensive ERP packages work as they are promised to and need about 10 in-house programmers and 20 consultants?