“For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world. But now, with the advent of huge Intel machines and the approaching release of a new version of Windows that will run on them, the company is changing its tune. For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company’s sales transaction database, Microsoft’s preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a “cluster”. It’s been a tough sell, however, with large corporations sticking with mainframes or Unix servers.” Read the report at News.com.
Microsoft Talking Big for Servers
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….is already running on the NEC thing, but without NUMA yet.
Interesting.
It will be very interesting to see how Linux and Windows.NET benchmark against each other on absolutely identical hardware in the near future. Both sides have a lot to prove and the rubber is about to hit the road…
I don’t honestly think performance is going to be the deciding factor in most cases. First off will be vendor support. Second will depend on the types of apps being used. Neither OS has a huge track record on the big stuff, but looking at how fast linux is maturing on systems with >16 processors and the fact that its A)free and B)opensource is IMO going to win out in the long run. I also think that historically Linux being the more stable of the two will make a difference as well. Another factor is when your used to big servers which traditionally run Unix, your more likely to Linux a fair shot. Also if the “Dell Way” of smaller clusters ends up being used Linux will win outright. Right now you just can’t even compare the two cluster-wise as Linux is just so much more mature in that particular area.
Lastly people in general are becoming very skeptical of MS at this point. Even all MS shops these days are becoming wary of the way MS milks them for money. Licensing 6.0 was a tremendous disaster for MS PR wise, and they pissed off a lot of companies. No one likes being squeezed for money when the economy is this bad. Then when MS turns around and is reporting 89% profits it makes them look horrible for holding their customers hostage at such a bad time. It’s completely obvious that no other company could get away with this without a monopoly.
SAP.
Performance will matter because SAP and many similar enterprise management systems are dual platform nowadays and which OS runs them the best will probably matter to most customers. Also, it will be good for MS to have something really big to run Exchange on because it is a critical application that many large companies use.
As for stability, currently about 50% of SAP’s customers are running it on Windows servers, so I have been told. How many SAP installations (or similar line-of-busniess apps) are running on Linux?
“For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world”
Yes, and “512k oughtta be ‘good enough’ for anybody” while microsoft alone pushes the tech to it’s limit while competitors take their false lead and scale down their own ambitions so that they will look inferior to MS by comparison.
I’m really sick of lies and liars, period.
F*ck bill gates and his whole liar company.
I know this isn’t an anti-MS site, but for how much longer???
I found one bench TPC-C :
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102111202…
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102070801…
These results are not really different and there is a lot of enhancement that will be done on all programs (RedHat 64bit, Oracle 10i 64bit, Win .NET 64 bit and SQL Server 64 bit).
Good news for Microsoft, the price difference is really small.
If you go Windows .NET server you will be using and for a while limited to MS SQL server. under Linux you can have Oracle, DB2, etc… Oracle and DB2 have a better track record than MS SQL Server. Plus since Linux is Open source, Companies developing for Linux can know the operating system that they are developing inside and out. This allows for there software to have stronger performance and stability.
When Microsoft drops support for Windows .Net in favor the next MS fad later on, those using the software will have huge issues getting support. Where for an Open Source product, support can be given by a third party easily. Oracle has taken this approach with Redhat.
Sorry for the link in my last message :
Bench running on the exact same hardware
Linux : http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102111202
Win : http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102070801
1st : Oracle seems to be not a lot faster than MS Sql (otherwise it means that Win .NET is a lot faster than RedHat).
2nd : Oracle, DB2 exist on Windows plateform.
3rd : Customizing Oracle or Redhat will be painfull to maintain if you want to upgrade to new versions later.
4th : There are a lot of API on windows and database drivers usable to customize everything you want without having problems (cf 3) and you reduce cost using RAD developement…