Dell Gives Android the Boot, Boots Up More Windows 8

hugheseyau writes "Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year's Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims it's doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market."

Comments

good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 and Server 2012 are far from "enterprise" they are basically toys. And don't even get me started on RT, RT is a hunk of junk, you'd think its a Microsoft product so you can at least join it to your Microsoft Active Directory domain to help centrally manage at some basic level, I won't even go so far as to ask for a little Group Policy.

Re:good luck with that

[smash]

You have actually worked in the real world, yes? Windows servers are far from toys and are in use in plenty of enterprises the world over.

Re:good luck with that

[epyT-R]

1. passive dedup could be done in userland using a script. big deal..

2. fs level crc/hashing already exists in ext4, but it is a recent feature. It's recent in windows too, so I don't see how either should be considered stable or reliable.

3. There are hardware crypto chips available which have drivers in linux, but I wouldn't trust them any more than TPM. If you're going to use crypto at the enterprise level, at least use something that you can have verified.

4. define 'joke'. what is lacking with linux lvm2? Most raid solutions in enterprise servers are hardware anyway.

5. logging is one of the most confusing messes ever on windows. this has been true since NT4 at least.. most of it is meaningless boilerplate that doesn't really tell you anything. If you're lucky, you get a hex string to shove into a search engine so you can join discussions on forums of people guessing at the problem just like you. Like managing the registry (vs text in /etc), it's mostly unsearchable without 3rd party tools and offers no more resistance to tampering than any other OS, but if you just mean the auditors give windows a free pass because it's the entrenched standard, you're right.
--

linux/bsd positives non all inclusive list.

1. sensible, flexible, searchable logging system that can be as verbose or as cryptic/dense as desired.
2. self contained services, each with manageable configurations.. easy to backup/propagate to many machines.
3. flexible thinclient configurability, from netboot disk images of standard distros to complete custom builds for each netboot device type. windows' botches this with remote desktop and licensing nonsense. Its nonsensical directory structure doesn't help either. the default windows installer ties the install to the specific machine and is not easily imageable without use of microsoft-designed hackneyed tools.
4. sensible install/uninstall tracking. windows has always been terrible at this.
5. No licensing auditors!
6. for intractable problems, having the sourcecode helps immensely. of course, this requires admins who actually know something about what they're administrating. with windows, unless you're a fortune 100 or better, you don't get that kind of attention from microsoft or any of its 3rd party 'solution providers', which do little more than patch serious functionality lapses in the base microsoft products, for exorbitant fees of course.
7. open source crypto engine with a variety of ciphers and hashing algos. Take your pick.. The admin can crypt a single directory, partition, or whole disk. the open part is key here since who the hell knows if there are backdoors in bitlocker or the TPM. It would not surprise me if there were. By using crypto, you admit you're paranoid, so why not go all the way and have the source verified by an entity you trust (or have it done in house)?
8. no upgrade treadmill.. upgrade as quickly or as slowly as you like. no pressure.

Re:good luck with that

[Onthax]

FYI: linux has zfs.

ZFS is the only FS to checksum data, ReFS checksums the metadata.

along that line, ZFS has dedupe and realtime snapshotting (something that windows doesnt have) HyperV snapshotting doesnt count.

But windows server 2012 is pretty sweet none the less.

Re:good luck with that

[arkhan_jg]

Please name me a feature that Linux has that Windows doesn't that is useful on the enterprise level.

1 - I can run fully functional VM instances of it in 64MB or 128MB of RAM and 2GB hard-drive on my VSphere cluster doing infrastructure work like DNS cache/DHCP in my custom VLANs. Windows Server Core is pretty light, but not quite THAT light. Frees up RAM for my heavy duty stuff.

2 - I trust it to run as a layer 4 multi-card firewall/router directly exposed to the internet that is far more configurable and powerful than an off-the-shelf solution. I'm not even sure what the equivalent to shorewall would be on windows.

3 - RADV demon for IPv6 running on an aforementioned mini VM. DHCPv6 and internet connection sharing aren't the same.

4 - NGINX web server wipes the floor with IIS for most web-serving duties on pretty much any metric you care to mention; security, robustness, speed, flexibility. And yes, I am also running several IIS servers for .NET 3rd party apps, alas.

5 - No licence worries about whether I've exceeding my allowed server count. Not all businesses can just drop a few extra K for more server licences on demand these days.

Don't get me wrong; I am running a bunch of Windows 2008R2 servers (AD, DFS file servers, dynamic DNS, Terminal Servers, several 3rd party app specific boxes, hyper-v trial for poor man's VDI) and they do their job - serve data to windows and osx desktops/laptops - well most of the time. (except the DFS setup, that's a been a buggy pain in the arse). But our network is a synthesis, using the strengths of both platforms to do what they do best.

BTW - BTRFS will be the equivalent or better to ReFS (which is also only just out in 2012). It's still marked as unstable, but Linux's unstable is still better than the quality of most companies' finished 'enterprise' software. Speaking from bitter experience, there...

Re:good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep we run couple hundred windows servers. They require 24x7 baby-sitting. And weekly scheduled reboots lest they run out of juice. We also run about a hundred Linux servers, which barely require any attention, with uptimes of over 800 days.

Re:good luck with that

[davydagger]

"Checksums/CRCs to guard against corruption. This is in ReFS, not NTFS. Linux has no production-level filesystem that can do this."
I'm pretty sure ext4 does this.I know for a fact btrfs does this.

In addition if you don't like Linux's ext4, which is a great FS, enterprise grade filesystems Are enterprises using ReFS now? Its new. How widespread is that? how does that really stack against ext4 for general usage. Or even JFS/XFS for database performance. Is ReFS tested? After ext4, btrfs is right around the corner. This is the filesystem of your dreams. MS has no answer.

"Logging, policies, and so on which are needed for anything bigger than the guy in his basement: Linux doesn't offer this, Windows does via GPOs. This is important come audit time, and the auditors are there."

pretty sure linux has that too.

"Please name me a feature that Linux has that Windows doesn't that is useful on the enterprise level."
1. runs on archecture other than x86, namely IBM's z-series. you don't use mainframes in the enterprise world, no sir.

2. scales well for multiple CPUs (as in hundreds-thousands), making it the de-facto OS for super computers.

3. stable, doesn't break. developers won't make accusations at you for reporting bugs.

4. Rock Solid drivers. drivers for linux are generally rock solid, with few problems. The exception being 3 party drivers written by reverse engineering. If your running enterprise and you have factory drives, this is not an issue.

5. performance in general.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/230527/ubuntu_linux_day_16_ext4_vs_ntfs.html
" ReFS does not support data de-duplication, copy-on-write snapshots (a ZFS and Btrfs feature"

weren't you just talking about this,

slow day at work mr balmer?

Re:good luck with that

[tibman]

I just run my init scripts after making changes. No need to reboot. But if i make changes to /boot then yeah, you'll have to reboot to check.

When you say "you aren't patching enough" you can only be talking about the kernel. Nothing else requires a reboot. Even then there is wierdness like kexec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec

Correction: It will be irrelevant:

[Penguinisto]

It's not like Dell hasn't wandered into markets before and failed miserably

Of course sometimes they just don't know when to quit.

Eventually, they'll get the hint and just focus on making servers and business workstations...

Dell is pretty much a division!? of microsoft

[tuppe666]

Lets use the correct term *Dependant* on Microsoft. Dell like all the OEM's is in the position of having only one supplier for its OS, and that makes it very weak, even more so as its only successful products rely exclusively on it. Where it is is very *safe*. Its just weird watching on the outside seeing this massive computing revolution, and a company *choosing* to remain Microsoft's bitch, even when Microsoft are working towards obsoleting them with their own products.

Re:Another company bets the boat on Windows

[tuppe666]

Their Symbian smartphone sales had already fallen off a cliff

They hadn't :) don't rewrite history, Nokia smartphone sales were twice that of Apple...and four times that of Samsung....and then the Memo happened.

That is not saying Symbian needed a long term *fix*...it did, but Windows Phone failed as the given solution...Symbian still outsells Windows Phone as a smartphone platform [2.3% vs 2%], Despite Elops best efforts.