> We are in the eternal struggle - trying to get Management to try LINUX on > the zSeries. > However, we are continually faced with the costs of Mainframe against Unix > and Windows Servers. > > Does the note below make sense or is there a counter argument. > > Look forward to help form the team. > > Paul Tormey > LAN Services > Standard Bank of South Africa. > > 011 636 4103 > 083 252 5292 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: 05 February, 2002 08:47 > To: Lea Van Der Want > Subject: Mainframes are More Expensive Than Racked Servers > > > > IT INSIGHTS FROM META GROUP --- February 05, 2002 > Published in association with ITworld.com > http://www.itworld.com/newsletters
You should pay great attention to Meta Group. I have here a copy of a magazine called Australian Technology and Business (Feb 2002), a ZD publication. I'd never heard of it; found it on sale at the newsagent at Perth Airport when there to farewell my baby. (She just avoided a heat wave of 35+ for some days in Perth by flying into the wettest Feb day on record in Canberra;-)). The magazine. Its cover article is "Is Windows Dead," and the pic shows a rather sad-looking Tux with a bunch of flowers at a tombstone with That Logo and "1975-2002." A panel discussess the best platform for several apps, and one of the panelists was Kevin mcIsaac, program director infrastructure strategies at industry analyst META Group. On Web serving, KE said, "META Group research says that Fortune 1000 companies have settled on one of three platforms, IIS with 47% market share, IPlanet Web Server 24% and Apache with 18%." He also said that web serving is best done from a farm of commodity servers, usually 2-way Intels. OTOH Dean Thompson (consultant in the areas of architecture deployment and computer networks and currently completing his PhD at Monash) says, "I have serious doubts about IIS for security reasons...." Geoff Halprin (MD and principal consultant at the SysAdmin Group) says, "I cannot, in good conscience, ecommend a Microsoft platform for Web serving under any circumstance." Kevin is a great fan of MS for database serving too. "Windows 2000 will be suitable for 90% plus of all application scalability and availability requirements. This will render Unix (other than Solaris) a legacy platform by 2004-2005." ... "Today, Linux is not a suitable operating system for a database server as it has very limited scalability and poor fall-over clustering support." The others weren't so enthusuastic about Windows for this task. WRT file and print serving, Geoff opines that in practice most users wouldn't know the difference between Samba and Windows servers. Kevin reckons that "the best" technically (eg performance, robustness) don't matter and that organisations should look to simplyfying their infrastructure by reducing the number of operating systems etc. Probably you can find the article on the ZD website someplace and see for yourselves what valuable insights are offered by M. -- Cheers John Summerfield Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/ Note: mail delivered to me is deemed to be intended for me, for my disposition.
