Crispin Cowan writes: > Ah, yes, the productivity argument. Microsoft argues that Windows > reduces costs because you can employ relatively low-tech admin staff to > manage these "easy to use" systems. What they leave out is the > astronomical cost of securing Windows, and the fact that you need > approximately TEN TIMES as many admins to keep a Windows server farm > running as compared to a similarly sized *NIX farm. > > Even Intel was unable to make their Windows compute farm running. They > eventually gave up and replaced the whole mess with FreeBSD, because > they were sick and tired of dealing with Windows pitiful stability. The > effect of instability is magnified when you scale up to dozens or > hundreds of machines. With a large enough Windows farm, chairs with > wheels become a critical part of your productivity, so that the guy who > re-boots the wedged Windows boxen can scoot from dead node to dead node > fast enough to keep them running. Actually, to the best of my knowledge this is not the case anymore (if it was at one point I don't know). Right now the compute farms contain multiple OS- WindowsNT, Windows2K, Linux, HPUX, AIX to name just some of them. The people who care for them are rediculously good- hence their ability to manage them effectively and keep stable and secured builds.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun May 26 2002 - 11:40:40 PDT