Uptimes are up.
UNIX pretty much sets the standards for Operating System reliability. I’ve been working on UNIX, Windows and Linux for a number of years now and will stand by this statement. Well, that is until I saw this: The 2007-2008 Global Server Operating System Reliability Survey. There are a number of very noteworthy points which I’ll cover with for you.
Linux moves into top gear.
The first point that came out of this survey was that mainstream Linux distributions have significantly caught up with UNIX when reliability was measured. At the same there, a 25% increase in downtime was noted in Windows Server 2003. Much of this time can be attributed to the sheer number of patches and security updates released resulting in a higher than normal number of reboots.
Falling through time.
Back in 2006, a similar survey suggested that Windows admins reported less downtime than their Linux counterparts. I won’t delve into that statement. Now, based on the 2007 - 2008 survey it would appear that Linux has made leaps of up to 75% greater reliability mainly thanks to some serious money being pumped into Linux development by the large vendors.
But we mustn’t leave UNIX out. The venerable OS is still the most reliable out there. The winner here is IBMs AIX which came in at an average 36 mitnutes downtime, over a twelve month period, being reported.
Another significant point that came out of the survey was the adoption rate of the Linux OS. The article shows that, as reliability figures rose, the adoption of the corresponding OS grew i.e. SuSe downtime decreased by 73% between surveys whilst market share grew from 13% - 17%. This increase could be the result of more revenue being available through higher market share or may simply be due to improvements in the SuSe OS.
Finally, the survey noted that use of Ubuntu is on the up. 22% of respondents stated that they used the Debian derivative in their business. The interesting point here is that Ubuntu is a relative newcomer to the server market but users reported only 1.1 hours of downtime per year.
Do you think Ubuntu will be the one to watch? Only time will tell.
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