Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Unix: An 800 Pound Gorilla No More?
Take a good look at which ox is being gored.
UNIX server counts are down, and revenues are down, because TCO for
UNIX has been dropping radically. UNIX servers such as Sun ES/400s
with 4 processors running at 100 Mips are being replaced with
partitioned servers such as StarFires, Regattas, and Superdomes with as
much as 128 processor cores, each running at the equivalent of 40 times
faster. Put another way, one new UNIX server is doing the work of
10240 SparcServer processors. More realistically, You can do the work
of about 1000 of the old UNIX servers with one new server.
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Organizations adopting Linux might not abandon Unix entirely.
Or, perhaps, just rebalance their systems according to their needs.
> | NASA's
> | Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has migrated its e-mail system
> | from Sun hardware and Solaris to HP servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
That makes sense. A Linux server, running on a 1 Ghz server with a
pair of RAID 200 gig hard drives can easily handle email for a few
hundred users, maybe even a few thousand (if you limit them to 50 meg
of storage locally and they use POP e-mail clients).
> | But even though the use of Linux on production servers is growing, the
> | practice isn't yet the norm at the laboratory, said Douglas Hughes, as
> | ervice engineer at JPL Information Services.
Linux does a better job with applications that have been designed to be
clustered. Traditional UNIX does a better job with larger applications
and threaded applications such as DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SAP, or Seibel.
More often, the best solution is to balance the two technologies.
Cluster what you can, and SMP what you can't. And than brings us to
the good stuff.
These new partitioned UNIX servers can do the work of hundreds of older
UNIX servers, but they can do the work of thousands of NT 4.0 servers.
So many times, applications had to be broken into lots of little pieces
to keep the servers from ending up in DLL Hell. UNIX servers can not
only provide much of that functionality, but there is less need to
break the pieces up. And when you do need to break them up, when Linux
or Unix flavors are available, it's much easier to put them in a
partition. Because you have the ability to farm jobs out to each of
the processors, you have better redundancy. This means that you don't
need twice as many servers as you are actually using.
> | [...]
> |
> | Linux servers Relevant Products/Services from HP have posted 15
> | consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, according to IDCs
> | Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.
What's really fun is to look at the growth in Unit volumes vs growth in
revenue. It's really interesting, and shows how dramatically the TCO
is dropping.
Conversely, look at the Microsoft Server revenues and the server
"growth" rates. It pretty dramatically shows that TCO for Windows is
going up.
> | The firm reported that Linux
> | server revenue grew 17 percent in the first quarter of 2006 compared
> | with the same period last year.
But Red Hat Revenues are up 40 percent, Novell revenues are up 80%, and
yet server and services revenue is only up 15%. Kind of tells me that
Linux is giving me a lot of bang for the buck.
> http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=01000147105M
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