Re: Unix vs. NT

John Clynes wrote: > > Whilst all of the answers above are true, does it not really depend on what > you want? > > Sure, UNIX offers proper security (although enough admins are slack enough > not to seal up wholes), better performance, scalability, reliability etc etc > but here would be a few of my good points about NT. > 1. NT admin is pretty piss easy in comparison to unix admin (or maybe I'm > just dim). No so much that NT is easier to administer. It is just that there is so damned little you can do, in NT, about anything that is not right. For UNIX there is more to know because there is more that can be known! This is not BAD THING it is GOOD THING! > 2. There are more people out there trainable in the admin of NT. When one > considers the difficulty and hence price in getting and keeping decent IT > staff (and their knowlege of the business) this must also be a > considersation. It must be easier to replace a NT admin than a UNIX admin. Subjective. If these guys are so easy to find maybe it's because there is so little for them to learn. Meow! :-) > 3. Typically on sites I've worked on the support costs for UNIX boxes have > been considerable. No argument. > 4. Hardware is much more expensive for UNIX Sorry but there are several UNIX's that run on the EXACT hardware that NT does, Intel, Alpha, and MIPS and Linux, in particular, runs on all three. > All in all I'd take UNIX any day, however, there are some plus points to NT. > > Feel free to disagree, I may be talking out my hat - I often do So, you've installed a speaker grill in that chapeaux? ;-) My comments: Beyond the security issues are the two largest reasons to favor UNIX over NT. 1) Performance. ALL UNIXes will outperform NT on the same hardware. Linux is the fastest UNIX available on the same hardware. 2) Reliability. Despite NT bigots (yes I count myself as a UNIX and Linux bigot; want to make something of it?) protests NT is just not reliable. When it is not crashing or terminating a critical task it is freezing up. I boot my NT workstation religiously weekly. Two weeks ago I was out on Friday so I did not shut it down on Friday as is my wont. On Monday I did not want to hassle so I just logged in. On Tuesday when I got in to work it was frozen! My Sun workstation (an ancient SPARCserver 20) has not been booted since I had to shut it down when the building powered down our floor in August and it had been unbooted for more than a year before that. 3) Scaleability. NT does not scale well and cannot currently scale beyond 4 CPUs. Linux scales well to 8 CPUs and continues to scale, though less well to 16 CPUs. The next Linux kernel promises smooth scaleability past even 16 CPUs. SCO also scales well to 16 CPUs and so does Solaris x86. If you go with NT where is your growth path? Or are you to bet that your business will not grow? If you outgrow PC hardware where do you go with NT? Alpha? MIPS? NT support for these platforms is poor at best and fading fast. Linux runs on Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, Sun is participating in porting Linux to UltraSparc, HP in porting Linux to PA RISC, and Intel in porting Linux to Merced (obviously just with specs for now). And the UNIX growth path also includes migrating between UNIXes. That path is easier today than ever and was never that hard. Over 90% of code and 99% of administration is portable between versions of UNIX thanks to POSIX. OK enough. You get the idea. Art S. Kagel