Reliability Survey: Windows Servers Beat Linux Boxes

Yahoo News ^ | Mon Jun 5 | Gregg Keizer

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux, a research firm said Monday.

According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey, only Unix-based operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 beat Windows on uptime. Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

^^^^^^^^^^^On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Laura DiDio on linux/windows reliability? Isn't that kind of like asking Dan Rather about conservatives in general and Bush's guard service in particular?

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Didio

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me

[butternut_squash_bisque]

One in a row...

[ko_kyi]

Funny - "Open source is commie" must be real news to people who are making FU money on it.

Pretty much all OS have improved, that much is true. I have to wonder how "uptime" is measured - do we count taking the system down for patching? Also, Administrative overhead is almost as important to me as uptime, so I avoid using Windows servers whenever possible.

[N3WBI3]

On average, individual enterprise Windows, Linux, and Unix servers experienced 3 to 5 failures per server per year in 2005, generating 10 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server.

So they are considering failures down time but not maintenance associated with defragmenting and and patching. My boss does not care why the system is down only that it is down.

But standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said.

I seriously question this, but like these types of articles on *every* side of an OS debate until you see how they collect the data the summary is pretty useless. Who was setting up the systems? My linux systems experience an issue that requires a reboot at most once a year.

The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.

This is what I am talking about while there is a need for better organization of the documentation out there if you know what youre doing there is just as much, if not more.

[sure_fine]

the more the tech, the more drive of some to hack it

that 'might' stop, right after they can stop graffiti

[ExDemSince92]

Laura DiDio completely ruined what credibility she had over the SCO's "smoking gun" source code evidence. At the very least, she showed that she would swallow nonsense hook, line and sinker. More likely, the words she spewed were bought and paid for beforehand.

You go to places like The Yankee Group or Forrester if you want to purchase a study that says exactly what you want it to say. That is all. It isn't research. It is marketing. Totally meaningless.

Unfortunately, the people these "studies" are aimed at often don't know any better.

[George Smiley]

Uptimes?

Nothing touches the uptimes you can get with a properly configured VMScluster.

[antiRepublicrat]

Open source advocates like to throw around the term "Microsoft shill" a little too often, but DiDio is one of the few cases where the term is always 100% applicable.

[N3WBI3]

A properly configured Zos Mainframe can..

[N3WBI3]

Laura DiDio completely ruined what credibility she had over the SCO's "smoking gun" source code evidence.

Absolutely here is a snipet from the wiki article Half posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Didio

In June, 2003, she was one of several analysts who agreed, under nondisclosure, to view snippets of code that SCO Group claimed had been inserted into the mainline Linux Kernel. She stated that "It appeared as though the Unix System V code (that is, SCO's code) complete with the developer notes had been copied and pasted right into Linux."

[free_at_jsl.com]

I just love studies like this. Let's pretend that it's not biased and consider the possibility that she's right (I know, this is REALLY hard if you know anything about Laura).

How often does Microsoft release a patch these days? On average they release at least one CRITICAL patch per month (I'm being VERY conservative here). After applying the patches, you need to re-boot the server and hence kick off all the users. Now, how often does Linux see a CRITICAL patch? Maybe once per year at best and even those don't usually require a re-boot after installation. I maintain servers with over a year of up-time on average. Windows (any version) will never get there.

"Windows is: A 32-bit extension of a 16-bit graphical shell of an 8-bit operating system coded for a 4-bit processor by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."

[zeugma]

How to properly measure uptime:

$ uptime
  9:41am  up 1349 day(s), 16:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.02

[rahbert]

VMS was the most reliable OS ever devised...

[antiRepublicrat]

I would really like to know how they measure uptime, too. Is it the OS itself or the whole system?

For example, I know I can do a lot with an Apache http server on Linux while it stays up, but I need to restart IIS quite often for various bits of maintenance or installation. When you're talking about a Web server nobody cares what the uptime of the OS is, they care about the uptime of the http service, which is OS uptime minus its own downtime.

IOW, this fails on its face. Do uptimes of 2003/IIS6/SQL Server vs. LAMP. Do uptimes of 2003/AD vs. RHEL Directory Server. Do MS file and print with 2003 vs. Linux/Samba.

[N3WBI3]

Show off ;)

-sh-2.05b$ uptime
9:59am up 836 days, 14:09, 2 users, load average: 0.36, 0.35, 0.31

[1L]

What is the unix command to determine how long your server has been up (or the last time it was rebooted)?

I confess to never having used a Windows Server product, but creating my BSD file server was so easy (and free, except for a hard drive and network card; got the other hardware from someone getting rid of their older machine) to install and set up and its been running without problems for around 2 months. I don't have a thousand users hitting it every minute (more like 2 a day), but even with the pains I had to go through to learn some unix, installing a Windows server couldn't have been any easier. And it wouldn't have worked on the hardware I'm using.

[N3WBI3]

When you're talking about a Web server nobody cares what the uptime of the OS

Sure you do and Ill tell you why..

a) When are you most likely to lose a disk or have other fatal hardware failure? The answer is during a boot-up, this is more often true if the drives have had a chance to cool down a bit.

b) What takes longer applying, for example, an RPM patch to apache and restarting the service or restarting the operating system? answer rebooting the OS.

[N3WBI3]

What is the unix command to determine how long your server has been up (or the last time it was rebooted)?

uptime