Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS 514
Ivan writes "
Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.
Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996.""
How long (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
How many Windows boxes where replaced with Linux last year where I work? Answer: None. How many Unix systems where replaced with Linux? Answer: Hundreds.
This is why Windows/Linux eats into HP-UX/AIX/Solaris market share.
Re:How long (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How long (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How long (Score:4, Funny)
I don't like *nix, its not a correct abreviation, since Linux is not spelt with any match for *nix. I would prefer it if people generally used:
*n?x, or
So, are we counting BSD as Unix?
Re:How long (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago we knew that the first casualty of Linux would be the proprietary Unix companies. The workstations first and then the servers. Although Linux is advocated as a Windows replacement most of the time, it's an even better Unix replacement. As Linux improves, it will just hurt Unix more. A friend works at a place where they've replaced almost all their Sun servers with Linux servers except the cluster of V880s that they have to still run certain software packages (Solaris only binaries). I could easily see them replacing those boxes with multi-cpu/core Opteron boxes (maybe even from Sun) running Linux if they had that software available. This is a place that has purchased multiple Sun E10Ks and multiple SGI O2Ks and the like in the past. Now, they are mostly Linux except where they have entrenched software or have issues where they need large systems (32p and 64p) and Linux doesn't work on them for some reason or work well on them.
TV Killed the Radio Star (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long (Score:4, Informative)
So I guess there is a little breathing space yet ;-)
Interestingly, if you RTFA and scroll down to the other links, you'll see "windows leads server OS pack for first time" last november ! [com.com]
dupe or astroturf - you decide ...
Re:How long (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet the number of intel based servers without an OS sold is far greater than the number sold with an OS.
Unless they release ALL the data it's a worthless study. have dell release all server sales with and without OS. without OS will dominate nearly 2 to 1.
Re:How long (Score:5, Informative)
Linux was listed in the ranking seperately (it came third, according to the article). Linux is not UNIX, so even if you bought it with Linux installed, it wouldn't have changed the relative positions of the two operating systems.
I agree that Linux would have come higher if the eventual OS installs of servers with no OS installs had been recorded, though.
Re:How long (Score:5, Interesting)
The researchers claim to have adjusted for that effect. Most servers are sold without an O/S because even machines bought as Windows boxes are likely to have the O/S loaded under a site license.
The non-Linux market for UNIX continues to shrink. As it does machines move from expensive proprietary platforms like HP, Sun or AIX to commodity Intel/AMD boxes. This means that Linux is effectively handicapped against the traditional UNIX varieties in this race, as is Microsoft of course.
Servers have been getting cheaper for years, the server market changes as a result. Forty years ago servers were mostly $1 million plus mainframes. Today its a definition thing, you can buy a 'server' for $100 in Frys and hang a printer off it.
All the growth in the market comes at the bottom end as small businesses start to invest in infrastructure. A law office with ten employees using Windows XP is going to buy a Windows server, end of story. An ISP with 100 Linux boxes doing hosted web is going to buy Linux for machines 101, 102,...
I don't think the survey is actually measuring real transitions. There is no compelling reason to move from Linux to Windows or from Windows to Linux if you have installed base. There is a huge cost incentive to move from proprietary UNIX to Linux. There is also a major incentive to introduce Windows Server systems to provide support infrastructure for networks of Windows machines.
There are relatively few areas of overlap between Windows and Linux. Both can host Web sites, but once you have developed active server pages you are locked into Windows. Both can host a mail server, but people do not buy Exchange as just a mail server, the calendar features are the real value.
Re:How long (Score:3, Informative)
Because there is a lot more to Windows server than NFS support. There is no open source system that provides a turnkey replacement for active directory.
The
Re:How long (Score:3, Informative)
Linux is not Unix, it's "Unix-like". I'm not particularly anal about that distinction, but there is one, and the distinction was made in this test. Solaris is "real Unix" (as I believe AIX is, I'm not sure about the BSDs). There's a specification for "what Unix is", so as nit-picky as it sounds, there's a technical reason that they don't count. There's a bit more explanation on this Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].
I was just trying to explain why Linux wasn't counted in the Unix ranking. On the other hand (as another reply
Re:How long (Score:3, Funny)
2 to 1 in favor of servers without an OS huh?
Well after consulting my very own set of non-existant/made-up data I must inform you that you are not even close! According to my data servers with an OS outnumber servers without an OS by more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would a market share report, whose audience is investors, want to report on that?
Sure, Unix boxes last longer... plenty of studies have established that... but these people are tracking sales figures.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the cause is probably somewhere in between.
Momentum... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is it simply that Linux is chewing into UNIX market share? They way that headline sounds one might think this is a case of pure market share gain for Microsoft at the expense of UNIX which is probably not the case here.
Re:not momentum (Score:3, Insightful)
(a) Did you miss the memo? It's 2006 now.
(b) Anybody who installs XP on FAT deserves to be shot. There's been no good reason to use anything but NTFS in Windows since 1999.
(c) FAT supports long filenames anyway. No application written since 1995 is even going to look for truncated filenames.
In fact, if I remember correctly, I think that even when you install XP on a NTFS file
Neither (Score:5, Insightful)
So, all of the free downloads and installs are not counted here. Windows had a lot of sales, unix lost some and Linux increased in sales. That's dollars and cents not usage.
With all of the free solaris downloads, linux downloads, and BSD downloads it's no suprise that unix purchases are going down. Why pay for it if you can get it free?
Sheer number of small servers (Score:5, Interesting)
The irony is that Windows applications often "don't play well together", making it almost a requirement that they get a dedicated piece of hardware. As a reward for this problem, their rankings are boosted.
Re:Sheer number of small servers (Score:4, Interesting)
two acronyms: ESX,GSX
that should start to get the numbers down.
Re:Virtual Server (Score:3, Interesting)
1. VMWare makes backups much easier. Just compress and copy a directory.
2. Disaster recovery. Did your main server just go down with five VMWare guests? No problem, just copy your recent backups (or from the crashed server's hard drive if it still works) to a new server's VMWare installation. No setting up all those apps and OS configurations. The VMWare host is a very simple installation that is easy to recover since no non-default apps other than VMWare are needed.
3. Do more with less hardw
In other words... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sheer number of small servers (Score:2)
I work for a small company just like the IBM ad., I am the IT department and my name's Dave. (Actually, my name's Tim, but I _am_ the IT department.)
Because we have several systems which are partly maintained by different 3rd parties, we currently run 4 Windows servers (1xNT4 and 3xW2K).
However, we _also_ have two Linux servers. One of them, is the main mail server and the other is the cvs repository.
I should think that the number of "small" Linux boxes is now pretty close to the n
Re:Sheer number of small servers (Score:3, Interesting)
However, if you were running these on Big Iron Unix machines you'd have them both on the same server. There's no point in wasting the resources of a large machine on a single task.
I should think that the number of "small" Linux boxes is now pretty close to the number of "small" Windows boxes.... but I doubt whether they come into these stats.
Similarly, what about all the routers running Linux
Re:Sheer number of small servers (Score:3, Insightful)
I've since stopped even trying to fight for "two things on one server". I've just seen them f
Servers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Servers (Score:4, Informative)
It's counted. They're using a combination of methods, remember, and that includes asking those surveyed "how many servers did you buy without an operating system, and what operating system did you put on them?"
Re:Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
So - for every box purchased, pre-loaded with Linux, it also generated a *sale* for Microsoft.
Now, it's been a year or two since I last checked into this, so I cannot say whether or not this *agreement* is still in force. However, I would not be surprised to see this still be the case.
Re:Servers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
and what rights would those be?
Re:Servers (Score:3, Funny)
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay - but are they equal in sale price?
What weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers? They both weigh the same but you do end up with a lot more feathers.
Absolutely true, apples to oranges... (Score:4, Informative)
It is incredibly difficult to produce a "market" leader measure without some consideration to the way that the market is measured. Fundamentally, that method determines the leader. Consider the obvious:
The market measure should be considered a dubious statistic, much like a political one. Raising the overall spending on education means nothing. Raising the overall spending per student, that means something. If you raise overall spending per student in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars), now you are really producing an accurate measure. The fact that most people can't understand basic comparisons--read the book Innumeracy [amazon.com] by John Allen Paulos--leads to this fallacy of a measurement.
Article seems misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Article seems misleading (Score:2, Informative)
We have to run a seperate server for each app that requires Windows as the server. So, instead of one server to run the apps we have four.
Our Linux servers do multiple duties. Same goes for the Novell servers we use. They all perform multiple tasks on top of the standard filesharing and print q's.
We had to pay for each copy of Windows server, Linux was free to install anywhere and the Novell is a site license per student so we can install it as many times as we want without additional fees.
It just goes to show ... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Could it possibly be that Unix server sales are down because Unix servers (non-free) are being replaced with Linux servers (free)? How surprising would it then be that the dollar value spent on servers is lower for Unix?
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:3, Insightful)
An administrator is a lot more likely to purchase a system without an OS and obtain his *nix distribution seperately, as there is no cost benefit and it gives him the ability to install and configure the OS without having to wipe a factory install.
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think there's any equivalent in the Linux world that doesn't require a lot of *nix talent for customization. (And the actual amount of *nix talent in the small biz market is practically zero.)
So, as long as the Linux world is so focused on Wall Street, it shouldn't be a suprise that Windows is outselling them on Main Street.
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:3, Funny)
Both are probably lost within the margin of error. Sorry.
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:2)
This would then suggest that Microsoft's should arrange things such that you need as many servers as possible, at greatest hardware cost possible, in order to win the sales numbers game.
"Oh, Mr. Customer, it would be best practice to run that Exchange server on its own isolated box. And run that IIS server on a different box. And, um, you should run that SQL Ser
Re:Microsoft's favourite trick... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
not necessarily (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not necessarily (Score:5, Interesting)
(Yes, it should have been patched, etc., but as it turns out this server is running Solaris 2.5.1, and everyone forgot it was there. the amazing thing is that it has run for over 6 YEARS without a reboot.)
Re:not necessarily (Score:4, Funny)
Send out a LOT of spam.
Re:not necessarily (Score:3, Funny)
And its IP.
Re:not necessarily (Score:4, Insightful)
"doesnt this really just suggest that windows servers need regular replacing to keep doing their job while old unix hardware keeps doing its job just fine?"
No.
If you are making a living in IT you know that you are still replacing servers as they roll off warranty and as they are fully depreciated. I'd no more put one of my Oracle databases on an old Linux machine than an old Windows machine. Requirements always go up, not down. Saying you can run Linux on older hardware is a misleading statement.
I suppose if a company is using Linux because it was free, or using UNIX of some form because it "runs on older hardware" they get what they deserve anyway - that's not the way to run an IT shop.
The change is likely due to the increase in blade-type systems which are well suited to a Windows environment. You can use a UNIX server environment and have interoperability with the end-users' desktop systems and the domain security model, but when you can just plug another cheap blade in and not have to worry about a third party authentication scheme, it makes Windows a pretty easy choice. Some of the arguments posted about not being able to run more than one app are not a shortcoming in the OS but rather a shortcoming in the developers. Plus, who cares if you need 5x$1000 blades to run 5 apps on Windows? It would cost more than $5000 to get the same sort of horsepower in a UNIX box.
Tools my friends, these are just tools. They don't know or care if you religiously defend them. Your IT careers will be more successful if you learn to use a variety of tools, each what is appropriate for the job.
Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
"Sales" being the operative word. How would one fit the free Linux options into this equation, I wonder?
Re:Linux? (Score:2)
Re:Linux? (Score:2)
Factory installs of an OS are usually poorly configured and need to be reinstalled up to company standard in any case, and there's nothing to stop you sourcing linux elsewhere for free and saving on the cost of having it preinstalled..
Re:Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
SuSe for OpenPower costs about 800 usd.
Redhat AES, the same, BUT, redhat charges you by installation, so, virtualization is more expensive with Redhat than SuSe.
Also, since IBMs OpenPower Machines, only runs on linux, they eat a chunk of market to aix (pseries), and even more, HPs Intanium and Opteron, run with linux, add this redhat/suse sales from Dell, and you will have a very and rich environment...
You still can
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty silly..... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty silly to count Unix and Linux separately.
No, it isn't; it would be silly to lump them together.
TFA was about sales. There are commercial Unix variants that cost money; Linux by itself does not. (There may be costs, e.g. when the Linux vendor includes N months of support, but this is not the same as paying for the OS.) Lumping 'non-free' and 'free' [as in beer] together would be like putting two dissimilar things in the same category.
It's pretty silly to try to count Linux at all (Score:2)
Certainly we have dozens of the things. Old, but maxed out desktops acting as essentially disposable servers running some critical network services (redundantly). I think we *might* have purchased one real Linux server, from Dell, or did it come with Windows automatically? I forget. So our ratio is more than 20:1. Makes a nonsense of the sales figures.
Wrong, sorry... (Score:3, Informative)
They share similarities to be sure, but they are not the same and should not be lumped together any more than Windows and Linux should be lumped together.
I have some numbers... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seeing as Dell doesn't force you to buy an operating system with their servers, why did you bother buying them in the first place?
Purchasing probably bought them... (Score:2)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe spottedkangeroo is a shopaholic.
-Eric
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:2)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:2)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:2)
Re:I have some numbers... (Score:2)
[ ] Windows Server® 2003 R2, Standard x64 Edition,Includes 5 CALs [add $599 or $16/month]
[ ] Windows Server® 2003 R2, Enterprise x64 Edition, Includes 25 CALs [add $2,471 or $66/month]
[ ] Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4, 1YR Red Hat Network Subscription, EM64T [add $262 or $7/month]
[ ] Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4, 3YR Red Hat Network Subscription, EM64T [add $785 or $21/month]
[ ] S
Unix != Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
But note that the article mentions the growth of both Linux _and_ Windows. This is really about the ongoing decline of pure UNIX mainfarmes - something we've all been aware of for years.
The fact that Windows OS now outnumbers UNIX boxes is neither suprising nor noteworthy. They've been chipping away at the server market for ages. Bound to happen eventually.
But what I would be more interested in is out of all these switchers, what's the ratio that switch to Linux compared to Windows? Linux growth is faster (Upgrades along the Windows path don't count, we're talking complete platform migration) I believe. But naturally the title of the article gives enough bias to encourage readers to miss that little tidbit. Or maybe using the phrase "Windows beats Unix" is the journalistic equivalent of shouting "Fire!" when it comes to grabbbing attention...
IDC Server Study (Score:4, Insightful)
The funny thing is that people's reactions are entirely based on the headline. If Slashdot runs the story as "Linux Server Revenue Up!", half the comments are about Microsoft going out of business or whatever. If they run the larger Windows numbers in the headline, everyone complains.
Anyway -- Here's a laundry list of objections that will no doubt appear:
+ This study doesn't count the servers I have running Gentoo/Debian/etc
-- Most of the revenue reported is actually hardware, so yes it does
+ How would they know what I'm running on my servers? I didn't get a preinstalled OS
-- User surveys, statistical methods, etc. It's not an exact count.
+ My *nix servers have 234 CPUs and run more applications than my Windows servers
-- Because the survey counts $$$ and not CPU or box counts, this sorta works itself out, but I guess this is valid.
+ We put Linux on our i486-33 Servers
-- Who cares? IDC doesn't, they're counting new server revenue.
In the war between Unix and Windows... (Score:2)
But I wonder how they determined what list to put a purchase in when a company buys somthing like an HP Proliant server. I've worked places where there are racks and racks of DL360s running Unix and other places where they are Windows. Seems like a somewhat dubious report.
Don't dismiss the "Linux is Free" (Score:2)
Small business, bulk hosting companies, and realy gigantic companies tend to roll their own Linux or use Free as in Beer distributions. Look at Google, for example. Note that Debian controls 16% of the linux server market: http://www.computerweekly.com/Article1319 [computerweekly.com]
That's 16% that goes unrepresented in marketshare numbers. Sun's OSS Solaris is going to h
Unix servers (Score:2)
NFS security is Unix security writ large and networked: if it's not root it's not important. If your machine has the right IP, and you've got root on the box, switch your UID and NFS gives you all priviliges for that user. And NFS is the ubiquitous Unix Network Filesystem! Goddamn, what a security mess. I'm looking a
Re:Unix servers (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel for you, but I've had extensive experience in both, and I can tell you that SMB/CIFS is just as bad as NFS.
So Windows wins up front (Score:2)
The question, about 2-3 years down the road, is how many companies will become disenchanted with their flaky Windows servers, wipe them clean, and install Linux on them? Up front sales are nice and put money in the pockets, but latency is a far more important measue of who's winning.
As always, misleading. (Score:2)
Sales != Usage (Score:3, Insightful)
{ Waiting for Microsoft evil empire conspiracy posts... }
Free servers (Score:5, Interesting)
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/2005121
Maybe not.
Re:Free servers (Score:3, Informative)
"Thank you for your interest in our Try and Buy Offer. For a limited time, Sun is offering qualified customers a free 60-day trial of the world's first eco-responsible server, the Sun Fire T2000 server. And, it's easy...Your complete responses allow us to instant
inevitable rise (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
Re:inevitable rise (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the *nix world concentrates on Internet hosting and Enterprise Applications (Java/Oracle/etc).In most cases Windows servers don't even compete with Unix servers because the strength of the application-set is almost entirely different. Many or even most companies actually buy both, depending on their needs (shoc
No, this is the reason for the shift (Score:5, Insightful)
You know whose lunch Linux has been eating? Solaris's. AIX's. HP/UX's.
You know how much a typical Solaris deployment with commercial servers would have cost? Right. $$$.
You know how much a typical *Linux* server costs? Right. In most cases, nothing. Sure, you can get Red Hat Enterprise and use a commercial Apache replacement and a commercial ssh, but that isn't what most Linux servers I'm aware of are running.
This has been making the dollar size of the market drop like a stone. That says nothing about amount of deployments. That just says that Sun and friends are bringing a lot less money home than they used to, and it's staying with the people who are using the servers.
"Windows Bumps Unix as Top Server OS"? Hardly. "Windows Bumps Unix as Most Expensive Server OS", perhaps.
EU Competition Authority (Score:3, Interesting)
Ballmer's Comments on the issue... (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Ballmer is now in the process of Fucking Kill(TM)ing his entire staff.
Re:Ballmer's Comments on the issue... (Score:3, Insightful)
It had:
Fine grained user security (far better than rwx)
Easy and powerful groups
Cheap hardware (ever price an SGI department server?)
Real-time compression
Easy transition for Mac and Windows people. (A lot easier than Irix, at least)
We ran Hummingbird for the Unix/WAIS/Gopher/Archie stuff, used a domain for the 15 Win 3.11 machines and 3.51 for a couple wor
Two Problems Here.... (Score:2)
Also, maybe people were happy with their reliable Unix servers that were installed years ago, and just didn't need to replace them. These figures don't say much about the actual used, installed base.
Reduced headcount is Windoze only benefit (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a damn good benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
Business is competitive. You can't expect companies to want to pay more than they have to.
How convenient to ignore LONGEVITY!! (Score:2)
For example, anyone who has worked with Sun hardware knows that for the most part Sun servers are built like frickin' tanks. Even Sparc 10s and 20s are still in heavy use my a lot of major corporations for small tasks, like test servers, low-capacity web servers
in other news (Score:3, Insightful)
(sigh)
Re:What about.... (Score:2)
You've heard of Redhat, right? Plenty of people and companies pay for Redhat Linux. We did. It's nice to have a company to bitch at when something goes wrong.
Red Hat yesterday said its sale rose 55 per cent during its third quarter of fiscal 2005, reaching $50.9m from the year-ago tot
Re:read closely (Score:2)
Re:This is impressive... (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux is third, so it must just be real Unix variants.
It's the latter. Cue apathy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux isn't counted in there, it's recorded separately. But even recorded separately, and marked only by hardware sales dollars (not the most flattering number to use, for a FREE operating system that runs on almost anything), it comes in third. So if you bought a server that came bundled with a Windows license, but then ins
Re:GNU (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I dont get it. (Score:2)
Re:OS-less servers (Score:3)
Re:OS-less servers (Score:2)
I don't imagine we're the only ones, either; I wonder how common this practice is
This practice is unlikely to be very common, atleast since its absolutely illegal. The Windows Server license that comes with MSDN is for development purposes only (non-commercial). Additionally, you cannot go about and install it all aro