[LINK] Long-term Linux half the price of Windows

[Rachel Polanskis]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Chris Maltby wrote:

> Much as I may agree with the motivation, there are a lot of questionable
> assumptions in this article...
>
> For instance, "Linux costs $74,475 to deploy, against $190,662 for
> Windows and $561,520 for Solaris" ... six significant digits?

<snip>

> But also have a	look at	http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/
> I suspect that they failed to properly normalise SPARC vs x86 performance
> - the "Servers per Processing Unit" table on page 2 gives a Solaris
> on x86 number in spite of the note above that no one seriously uses
> Solaris 8 on x86. [157*2.2 = 345.4 but the 2.2 scale factor is for x86,
> not SPARC! and they are applying it to an average cost per server derived
> from the survey, without defining the capacity of the servers.

Very good points, Chris.  I also boggled when I saw the Solaris comparisons.
You also get what you pay for too.   Linux on Intel doesn't scale anywhere
near as well as Solaris on SPARC.  The Sun processors may be more expensive,
but you can run far many more Oracle instances or Apache virtual servers
on them then a similar Linux/Intel system.   They also have improved "lights out"
management technology that lowers admin costs further over a Linux system.

Also, if you are serious about using Linux in an Enterprise situation,
you will not use low end hardware and will use RAID controllers, gigabit
ethernet and redundant power supplies and subsystems.  Linux can do all these
things on the right hardware, but not as neatly as Sun and the cost difference
to do so is further eroded when you have to shell out for the high end boxes.


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove@zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
      "People don't say sorry in this country" - Max Connors (Seachange)

----------
For Link list information see http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/link/