Other people outside of the Open Source community agree with me:

Linux is not completely ready for the mission-critical enterprise space as yet, but it is heading in that direction, Shane Robison, chief technology officer for Compaq Computer Corp., said yesterday in his keynote address at the opening of the LinuxWorld conference in San
Francisco. "Many corporations are hesitant to adopt Linux, as it lacks a one-stop support network that is robust and reliable. Bugs also need to be fixed rapidly, and corporations need highly skilled staff who can provide complex system integration and migration," Robison said.
Linux scalability has been enhanced with the release of the 2.4 kernel, with SMP scalability to 16-way now possible, but this is "more likely on four- and eight-way systems," Robison said.


Walt Boyes
co-author of "e-Business in Manufacturing: Putting the Internet
to Work in the Industrial Enterprise" ISA Press--September 2001 ISBN:
1-55617-758-5
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Walt Boyes -- MarketingPractice Consultants
[email protected]
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Walt,

If I concede the "One-stop support network" for the sake of argument, which of the statements below do not apply equally to Windows as it does to Linux? I would point out the "robust and reliable" part to anyone who has had to sit on hold for MS tech support. Also, I would point out that history has proven repeatedly that the Linux/BSD/whatever method of bug fixing through the usenet postings etc. is always faster than a response will come from Redmond. So if you want a "one-Stop" support network, fire up a news reader....

--Joe Jansen

 

Yes and if you read the rest of his keynote speech, it looks like a carefully crafted marketing blurb.

If it smells like FUD, chances are that it is FUD.

The only surprising thing about this particular FUD is that it wasn't even cleverly disguised.

BAH!

--Robert

 

Just a couple, I've got to get busy with other things.

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/resources/news/20010828_mycroft.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/news/us/2001/08/286.html


You beat me over the head with your clippings, I'll beat you over the head with mine...

John

 

Just a couple, I've got to get busy with other things.

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/resources/news/20010828_mycroft.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/news/us/2001/08/286.html

You beat me over the head with your clippings, I'll beat you over the head with mine...


John

 

Hi Walt

Yes, some people outside the Linux community agree with you. Some people inside the Linux community agree with you. I would say that Linux is more ready than Windows is but that it depends on what your mission is. The people whose systems _must_ stay up use mainframes or UNIX clusters.
Period. This is the upper boundary. The lower boundary is the desktop where an occasional boot is an annoyance. In the vast middle ground there are many, many, missions that are well served by Linux. I find that most of the people who don't find Linux to be ready for mission critical use have an enormous investment in MS. I think it's more instructive to get past what people say and look at what they do. IBM sells Linux on mainframes and server hardware. As a matter of fact you can buy an off the shelf supercomputer from IBM running Linux. Cray does Linux. Silicon Graphics does Linux. Several national laboratories have built or are building some of the largest computers in the world on Linux. Many oil companies use huge Linux farms. The USPS uses
vast numbers of Linux boxes for processing mail. SAP does Linux. Google runs on thousands of Linux boxes. There are hundreds of thousands of Linux
boxes in ISP's and remote hosting farms. The majority of e-mail is handled by sendmail under Linux. And lastly, my mission is certainly served by Linux machines and they are sure as hell critical to that mission. As these are much closer in scope to the systems we deal with than the 32 and 64 processor systems that Compaq hopes will save their bacon, I submit that Linux is mission critical to a lot more people than say it isn't. And the overall reasons cited for these installations are reliability and cost. What's your mission that couldn't be done with Linux?

Regards

cww

 

Yet I have a friend who is webmaster for one of the largest commercial internet sites. He says that properly set up, a Win2K server is the most
stable platform he's ever worked on after 20 years as a *nix weenie. He says that except for when he's brought the system down for maintenance, he has had no problems, no lockups and no unscheduled reboots since January 2000.

Walt

 

If you really want stable web servers though, go check out
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
The top 30 are all FreeBSD, BSD/OS machines, or Irix (SGI Unix, and even then its just one hosting company with 4 servers).

 

Stranger things have happened. We have people on the list who say that WinME never crashes.

Regards

cww

 

On the other hand, I know long-time Microsoft users who use the phrase "Windows ME" synonymously with "bite me".

Greg Goodman

 

Hi All

I heard of a new product, combines the best of WinCE, WinME and WinNT, called windows CEMENT which although obscure seems quite appropriate.

D.P.