The High End WebServer: Solaris or Win2K Datacenter (or Linux?)
Ok, so the story here is about the dominance of Sun in the truly high end webserver arena. Sun vs. NT Datacenter and Linux. Yeah, and I threw in the Linux bit, when you are talking multi SMP (redundant I know, but you get the idea), multi cluster and mega mega ram to run a serious site, Sun dominates.
Sun Solaris vs. NT Datacenter is the real battle? The linked TechWeb article does not consider Linux in the high end equation. It is not prevalent, but it is there, high end cluster sites based on Linux do exist and will increasingly. Linux aside for a moment, consider the Sun vs NT battle.
My take is that Sun obviously wins the battle but I have an issue with the Sun model. Sun gives away the code and makes all of its revenue on the hardware. That is short sighted in my opinion. Unless you can port the code to other hardware types that model may fall flat. Regardless of what you think is the best, SPARC, ALPHA, RISC, Intel, etc., the fact is that the market share behemoth is Intel (and clones) and that the new Intel products will compare in performance and outperform in cost the other models. My point is that giving away your code that only runs on your machine is not really giving away the code. The Sun model may be the best you can get right now, and that fact alone is what makes it a factor (and as long as that remains true, the model will work, when other hardware types catch up, and other free software is available as an alternative, with a solid support structure, look out.)
As for NT and even the Datacenter version which supports 4 way clustering (yawn) is not a real high end high availabilty player. Microsoft would like to make it that, and they would like to get out of the small to mid server range (which is the only place NT fits right now) but I dont see it happening. Unless this product is a complete turnaround, even from Win2K Advanced server (which I have used) then it wont happen. And, we all know that DC is not that different from ADV, it costs more (which I think was another stupid move by Microsoft, to splinter the product line and create different products per number of CPUs in a machine with truly the same architecture and software was crazy, thats another argument altogether, but it was silly) and it has some added code, but is the base code and true availability different? That is what a high end implementation demands, it does not request it, it demands no downtime, we cant reboot every week to clean up memory leaks!
In my humble opinion Sun wins and Linux is on the horizon. NT is still NT, just with a fancier name. Solaris8 v NT: TechWeb
