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That Microsoft "get the facts" site is just chock full of fun stuff
- and oddly enough I actually want to be positive about something I
found there last week.
Specifically, an IDC study on the choices people make when considering Unix/Linux or Windows as a migration target is worth reading on its own.
That Microsoft "get the facts" site is just chock full of fun stuff
- and oddly enough I actually want to be positive about something I
found there last week.
Specifically, an IDC study on the choices people make when considering Unix/Linux or Windows as a migration target is worth reading on its own.
The paper outlines part of an analysis of 400 interviews done in
2005 with people somewhere in the decision making chain in companies
that are considering migration from a Unix such as HP-UX, Tru64, AIX,
SCO, Solaris, or Linux to Windows or another Unix.
IDC's key conclusions were:
- In the Unix/RISC world, Windows did best against IBM AIX and HP-UX,
as surfaced in the study results, while Linux did best in replacing
Solaris. IDC believes that ISV packaged application availability may
help to explain Windows affinity for the AIX and HP-UX customers.
- "In the study sample, Solaris was seen to be far more impacted by
migration to Linux, although Solaris was less impacted by competing
Unix operating systems (12%). IDC believes that a large part of this
trend is driven by IT and Web infrastructure workloads deployed on
Solaris, which move more easily to Linux than more complex and
demanding enterprise workloads (e.g., BI, OLTP, and other business
processing applications).
- "Although 42% of all IBM AIX migration in the study sample was to
Windows and 22% was to Linux, 15% of IBM AIX migration was to Solaris
and HP-UX, with Sun Solaris the bigger platform winner.
- "While HP-UX was more exposed to Linux migration than AIX (34%), it
was also challenged by Windows (40%) and other Unix variants (19%). For
cases in which HP-UX migration moved to other brands of Unix, IBM AIX
appeared to win more share than Sun.
- "By a strong 4 to 1 margin, SCO Unix users reported that they
preferred Windows as their new server platform. IDC believes this
preference may be driven by SCO's ISV and reseller community as well as
the fact that SCO Unix has always been deployed on an x86 server
platform, rather than on a RISC platform.
The most interesting results given are those pertaining to the IBM
and HP communities - the former because nobody chooses AIX on product
merit and the latter because most of the people still using HP-UX and
Tru64 continue to do so mainly to prove they were right not to choose
Sun in the ninties. For example, 56% of sites reported some AIX use on
a similar survey done in 2003, while 55% do so today - and compare that
stability with the disaffection of HP's base where a combined 81%
showing for HP-UX or Tru64 in 2003 dropped to only 58% in 2005.
Solaris, incidently, went up over the period: from 71% to 80%.
Notice, however, that Linux numbers aren't reported - and that's
because it's to Microsoft's advantage to support the idea that Linux
isn't Unix. This report, for example, could just as well have appeared
on Red Hat's site as Microsoft's; an oddity explained by the reality
that Microsoft sees Lintel as a kind of halfway house, a mere stop on
the road from Unix to Windows, and therefore supports Red Hat's
anti-Sun campaign exactly as they would the activities of any other
strategic partner.
It's important, in this context, to note that Microsoft's support
for Linux is ultimately driven by its contempt for the people who day
in day out sell Microsoft to their employers - because those are the
people who take over from the Unix experts when Lintel replaces
Solaris, HP-UX, or even AIX and whose expertise then drives the
downstream slide to Windows.
A cynic would notice, too, that the study's most dubious result is
reported with respect to Solaris - Figure 4, page 7, consists of a
barchart showing less than 20% of 835 Solaris applications being
considered for migration - but Figure 6, page 10, is a barchart showing
that more than 50% of 341 Solaris users are considering migration to
Linux.
Beyond that, however, there's a reason that Microsoft would be well
advised to get this study off their "get the facts" site - and why Red
Hat shouldn't then pick it up. The reason is that recent hardware
change makes the explicit message: that web server applications should
should be migrated to Lintel, a strategic mistake for both of them.
That hardware change is the release of Sun's Niagara One, or T1
UltraSPARC - the first product in the CMT/SMP "coolthreads" line to hit
the market.
Prior to the T1, the case for moving a web application from
something like a Sun 450 bought in 1999 to a new Lintel box was pretty
good - no significant application change, similar or better
performance, 25% of the power cost, 10% of the space and maintenance
cost- and really only went wrong for customers who paid Red Hat's fees
and/or put Wintel people in charge.
What the T1 does is reverse that cost case by making the argument
for moving web applications from xtel to Solaris/T1 overwhelming: up to
ten times the throughput with half the input cost - and, incidently,
creating opportunities for Unix people to take back operational
control.
It's not just web applications either: any multi-threaded workload
in which neither floating point nor absolute minimum execution times
are critical requirements is a candidate. Consider, for example, this report
of a four core, 1Ghz T2000 blowing away a pair of 2.4Ghz Xeons with
hyperthreading by a factor of about 2.7 on an Erlang benchmark with 16
concurrent threads - and the next generation will handle 64 concurrent
threads, be competitive on floating point, and still use the same rack,
the same power, and the same software.
In other words any Unix sysadmin who reads this Microsoft sponsored
study should see it as job insurance. Just download and distribute the
study, ensure that the bosses understand the cost case Microsoft's
consultants are making for migrating web applications to Linux, and
then show them the T1 numbers -because Microsoft's logic is right, and
any web applications on site should be immediate candidates for
migration to the T1/Solaris combination
Read the original article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=741 |
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