On Oct 28, 10:52 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> SWsoft tries to virtualize China before VMware speaks the language
Virtualization is going to get very hot. With Motherboard makers now
including hypervisors in their BIOS, the standards are established,
and the market could get very competitive.
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/27/swsoft_china_inspur/
> Virtualization is hot because Windows is not.
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Like many frustrated Unix weenies I bear a long standing resentment for the
> | way Microsoft simply obliterated the enterprise server market back in the mid
> | 90's.
Which part of the 90's are you talking about? Microsoft blew away
Novell in 1994-5 when they included file sharing and printer sharing
with Windows NT 3.5 and later Windows 95. Windows 95 was terribly
insecure but Microsoft kept that little problem quiet.
Windows NT 4.0 did make a nice deep dent into the Novell market, but
even then, Linux and SAMBA were already making inroads.
Microsoft DID have a large percentage of the SSL Web server market.
Apache running on *nix was doing most of the "heavy lifting" in the
front end. Unix also did the heavy lifting on the back-end,
especially databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and DB2.
Linux and Unix were also being widely used for IP routers, e-mail
relays, and numerous other "back end" systems.
> | Whether your favorite flavor was Solaris, HPUX, AIX, or IRIX (mine!) a
> | Unix guy grew up with things like reliability, uptime, shared resources,
> | multitasking, simple interface and openness.
And the corporations that I worked with (numerous financial
institutions, brokerages, insurance companies, publishers, and large
corporations) still used UNIX for most of their "Heavy Lifting".
Microsoft was quite fond of comparing a pair of rendundant servers
performing a single function such as IIS to a UNIX server which
usually had the capability to run the IIS server, the DNS server, the
LDAP/Security service, the Database server, and complex application
servers used to manage work-flow, business rules, and exception
recovery.
It often took 4-6 Windows servers to perform the work handled by a
single Linux or UNIX machine. DLL conflicts, version
incompatibilities, and slow context switches, all prevent the use of a
single Windows server to do multiple functions. Windows also had a
reliability problem. The problem was that in order to get reasonable
performance, application writers had to create applications using
multiple concurrent threads running within a single process. With no
memory protection between the threads, there were more problems with
race conditions, deadlocks, bottlenecks, and memory allocation.
Microsoft eventually made radical changes to Windows 2000 which
improved the scheduler and made it more practical to use apartment
threads, message queues, and other techniques to make it more reliable
- but most of these weren't implemented until Microsoft declared
Windows NT 4.0 "obsolete" in about 2003.
Because the Windows machines were not as reliable, architects would
use multiple redundant servers in "hot standby". Many of Microsoft's
"success stories" involve dozens, even hundreds, of redundant Windows
servers performing simple acts of "caching" and "routing" of simple
transactions to or from remote servers.
An even bigger problem for the Unix "share" of the market by revenue,
was that the cost of Unix systems was getting progressively cheaper.
IBM's Power PC chip was also being used in the iMac, and this made the
chip costs for server chips much lower. Higher speed memory was also
getting cheaper, along with high speed network and storage solutions.
Linux had increased the demand for low-cost SCSI RAID arrays.
Furthermore, Storage was often "Built In" to Windows servers,
especially towers. UNIX servers and Linux servers often used SAN and
NAS storage, which made the price of a *nix "server" much cheaper.
In 1980, a VAX server would cost 1/2 million dollars including storage
and peripherals. In 1990, the price of a single processor 8 megabyte
server had dropped below $20,000 and 6 processor 64 megabyte SMP
systems such as the Sun/6 processors had dropped to less than
$50,000. By the end of the 1990s, the price of a single processor
Solaris server had dropped to below $2,000. Today, SMP servers with 8
cores and 16 gigabytes of storage can easily be configured for under
$50,000. In effect, the modern 2007 Unix or Linux servers can do the
work 10-20 servers of the 1990s.
Ironically, Microsoft is still playing the same game. Pointing to
increased box counts and revenue, not realizing that they are simply
demonstrating the superior TCO of Linux and Unix.
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=469
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