George said:
Ahh... you've missed the English idiom there - I wasn't sure if that had
migrated to Canada: "cheap & cheerful" is an English term applied to
cheaper, usually tacky, versions of the real thing, e.g. things like a
Tandy branded "Hi-Fi system", a Trabant car or the likes. IMO it was a
gross hyperbole by the author... but typical of what gets past the
incompetent/misguided tomfoolery of the editor(s) at the Grauniad... which
even has blogs dedicated to its "ablution":
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2005/08/more_humiliatio.html
Actually, it's the first time I've even gotten a hint that you're from
out UK way. You may have mentioned it to other people in some other
threads, but I missed those completely.
But of course, you're from there, you got a colorful derogaratory term
already available for the Guardian newspaper, which would indicate
you're locally familiar with it.
As for price, is a similarly equipped x86 really much cheaper than a
Risc-based server?... say a low cost Sparc vs. an equivalent power Opteron?
The cost of the CPU as a contributor to final price is pretty small when
you add in the RAS & lights-off management features and a capable chipset
for a real server. When you add in the costs of M$ server offerings the
final price ramps up pretty quickly. Could be that the "Risc-CPU" vendors
have been inflating the prices... overrating the premium due for the unique
CPU??
The new Sun Fire (Galaxy) x2100 server costs about US$750 in its most
basic configuration. It has LOM and RAS features included. Sun tried to
sell some crappy UltraSparc boxes a few years ago (Sun Ultra 5 & 10)
for cheap but they never went below $1000. Usually they never go below
$10,000.
My work doesn't bring me into direct contact with many others doing
server/Internet ops but I follow the industry fairly closely and I haven't
seen any indication of a noticeable widespread trend towards Windows there
in any of the published material, e.g. at Network World and similar
industry watchers... and I certainly hope that we're not going to see a
growth in ActiveX polluted Web sites.
Not just Windows, but x86 in general. For example, websites seem to be
going overwhelmingly Linux and Apache, replacing Sparc/Solaris and
Apache. Microsoft IIS is almost dead now, killed by its own reputation
for being an unsecure POS.
However, in the database side of things, you'll see equal amounts of
Oracle and MS-SQLserver. SQLserver on smaller projects, Oracle on the
bigger ones. Oracle you'll see running on either Windows or Linux quite
often these days too, again replacing most of the Unixes (including
AIX, Solaris, and HPUX). Whether they choose Windows or Linux largely
depends on whether there is any local Linux/Unix expertise, which
usually there isn't.
Other things you might see running on x86 more often than not these
days are Windows-based Active Directory (which could be used to replace
DNS, since it includes the DNS protocol); in many ways, AD is superior
to old fashioned BIND, simply because of its automation -- it adds
servers automatically to its list without needing to change a config
file. Network backup services, such as Veritas Netbackup, Tivoli
Storage Manager, Legato, etc., are often being run off of Windows
servers rather than Unix ones; they'll even be backing up Unix servers.
Mail servers, namely Exchange, is the undisputed corporate email
standard, and runs only on Windows.
Recent surveys still seem to indicate a huge lead for Apache vs. IIS;
whether it's Unix or Linux.... what's the difference? With $4.6Billion of
factory revenue for Unix servers in 2Q05
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS00223005 it doesn't exactly
appear to be fading away. Ranking in terms of "factory" $$ is not the only
way to look at this of course but even there, the strongest growth is in
Linux it would appear.
Misleading to compare revenues rather than actual numbers. The reason
Unix revenue is so high is precisely because it is too expensive.
People are simply not willing to play that much for servers anymore
these days, unless they have no choice. In other words if they already
have a preexisting RISC Unix installation, and they want to upgrade the
hardware they will go with the exact same RISC/Unix combo they already
have. You won't even see them move from one RISC/Unix to another
RISC/Unix, because if they could migrate in that direction, they might
as well have migrated all of the way to x86/Windows. So RISC/Unix is
being supported mainly on repeat sales these days.
Yousuf Khan
