Depends on how you define "enterprise". I teach training classes for
Compaq reseller engineers (not work for them; just train for them), and
very few of the people I talk with would consider selling NT to an
"enterprise". This is literally one of those cases where marketing paints
a very distorted picture of reality. Compaq only offers reseller training
for NT because Microsoft has apparently convinced them that NT is the only
important platform. But even in a class that is clearly labelled as being
about "StorageWorks on NT", here's the order in which people are interested
in operating systems:
1. VMS -- that's right, VMS is the most popular OS I've seen in this case.
Most VMS installations use clustering between five or six nodes, often
distributed over a wide distance to protect against power outage or natural
disaster.
2. UNIX -- generally Tru64 since these are Compaq resellers, also some
Solaris. UNIX provides about the same reliability per node as VMS, but
clustering isn't nearly as mature. As a result, it doesn't get used as
much.
3. NT -- these are people who are selling low-end servers like departmental
web servers and hoping for minimum effort, or who don't have a clue about
their customer's needs and are selling NT for the hell of it.
4. A tie between Linux and Novell -- Novell sucks but is supported for use
with this particular hardware that I'm teaching; Linux doesn't suck quite
as much, but it has no support.
I talked to someone a few weeks ago who described a system he just sold --
5 minutes of down time costs this customer about $500,000. That means that
the 33 minute fsck costs about 3.3 million dollars. Do *you* want to tell
this person that fsck is tolerable?
Chris Smith
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