Well, it looks like you've supplied your own TCO study when you said "...with the volume of data we are dealing with, it would disrupt normal company operation to do anything else."

Why not just explain the issues involved to your boss and the specific advantages for your situation?

That said, a quick web search found that Linux has half the TCO of Windows and double the performance of a Sun solution.

Of course that was a study for a unrealistic situation. I quickread through the document, and it discussed a server park (web services), without saying anything about a backup solution, high availability, etc. Usually, SLAs will mention availability and maximum restore times.

I don't want to dismiss the document, but I do want to stress out to not use it to generalize. It does discuss TCO of a specific setup - and can't be taken as a general comparison between Linux, Windows and Solaris (I doubt that's even possible).

Abigail

Go to WinFace and select LinuxWorld.com series on TCO under the cover of The Unix Guide to Defenestration

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Thanks, these sources helped out.

Go to Google and do a search on Linux TCO. As well go to the IBM web site and do a search on the same terms there.

IBM has been going really gung-ho over Linux in the last couple of years so you should be able to find white papers a-go-go there on the subject.

Forget I ever said anything, I just read your title.

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Hmm ... I re-edited the window, thinking I was changing the contents of one message. But it must have been the initial editing window, it's turned into three messages!!

Honest! I'm not THAT fond of my words!

So why have I now put up a FOURTH message?....

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So why have I now put up a FOURTH message?....

I think I see your problem:

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     ^^^
    This is clearly wrong and encodes the redundant redundancy protein
+ of redundancy.
[download]



--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

here you go

Seriously though, if you're going to take such biased, general links from one side, why not take them from both?

I particularly liked this part:

Windows 2000 Holds Networking World Speed Record As part of the bi-annual Internet2 Land Speed Contest between corporations and research institutions, senior networking engineers from Microsoft put Windows’ performance to the test. With two off-the-shelf PCs running Windows 2000 Professional, the PCs sent a stream of random text coast-to-coast at 750 megabytes per second - faster than ever before on a land-based network. That's fast enough to carry all the music on a CD across the U.S. in six seconds, approximately 15,000 times the speed of a standard 56 kilobytes per second modem.

I want to know where they live that the standard modem transfers 56 kilobytes per second. I'd also like to know how they consider a jump in network speed record to be solely attributable to the computer at the end of the conversation. Also, although admittedly I didn't read all of the documents, none of the benchmarks I see run on the same make and model of hardware even though there are Unix and Unix-based OSes which do run on the same hardware as Windows. They make a big deal about Solaris and AIX on proprietary hardware being slower per cost and calling it 'analogous hardware'.

Also, they call it a Windows vs. Unix TCO comparison, but...
• They often put in a section header saying something like "Better Reliability". They then mention that they reengineered NT 4 to come up with 200o or 2000 to XP, or 2000 to 2003 in order to make it more reliable and thast that worked. Well, hooray for them, but that's misleading and has no place in a Windows vs. Unix comparison, as it's a comparison of two versions of Windows. No improvement stats ar egiven for any Unix implementation.
• They mention uptime guarantees given by Windows system integrators and omit any info about similar guarantees in the Unix market, which obviously exist. They are trying to intimate that they are the only OS vendor whose product is covered by integrator's guarantees.
• They make severl claims about Windows devoid of any comparisons to Unix of any flavor, and sometimes without any quantitative analysis.
• There seems to be this big attack of some form of Linux by the "impartial" IDC, commissioned directly by MS. I see no reference to a particular product, distribution, configuration, etc. These were Windows shops that had recently adopted Linux, too, no doubt.
• A five-year TCO study on a 3-year old OS? Please! Not to mention that you lose support form MS after the product has been on the shelf for 5 years and must pay your license fees all over again. That leaves two years for Windows 2000.


All in all, these papers are good reading if you're practicing developing your own FUD campaign.

Christopher E. Stith

i had already taken those.. ie my searches not yielding "what I was looking for" hehe :)

You say you're searching for information, but you don't say what information you want. Makes it hard to provide the answers.

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