Windows vs UNIX

What UNIX Worshippers forget to tell you

First lets me remind you that UNIX Worshippers usually confuse operating system with an application. So if IIS has holes or crashes they would call it "Windows problem", if IE has holes it's again "Windows problem", if WINS has security issue it's "Windows problem" and so on. Let's differentiate apples and oranges.

Windows built on NT kernel is extremely reliable system, there are system integrators over there which would guarantee you 99,99% of uptime on Windows OS ( http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1244011,00.asp), they would not just guarantee uptime but also ready to back this by cash (http://msn-cnet.com.com/2110-1001-962301.html), I have not seen such claims from Linux distributors. The common problem with so called BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) in 90% of the cases called by hardware not being on HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) or drivers not signed by Microsoft or poorly written third party programs.
Another tale going around is that Windows crashes all the time and needed to be rebooted system every 2 days, ... Screenshot below is taken from a live server. This is a firewall, VPN server, NAT Server, Reverse and Forward application proxy server. It does not mean that it's all that it can do, I just took the screenshot to show the point - you can run Microsoft OS and products for months if not years without glitches and downtimes. In fact the only time I had to reboot this box is to install SP, that's it. Here is another interesting information (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html ). In list of longest running systems there are some Windows boxes with uptime in years. Linux is not presented in list at all.

So about stability and quality of applications running on Windows. As I specialize in web servers I would compare IIS and Apache. IIS is as stable as Apache, things which might make it unstable are usually caused (as everything else on web servers) by poorly written applications. If you would host plain ASP pages and static content I would guarantee that IIS would run as long as any Apache. Some UNIX fanatics rely on Netcraft data to draw conclusion about stability of OS based on netcraft surveys, but if you would look behind the scene and check what site are having longest uptimes you would see that it's a site consisting of SINGLE STATIC page likehttp://wwwdir1.telia.com/ (At the moment of writing this it was displaying "This page is not in use"). Give me collocation space, Windows2000 or later and I'll guarantee you the same uptime on the same kind of server. This goes even further, uptime which is measured by Netcraft can actually be measuring uptime of the front-end machine perfoming HTTP request on your behalf (reverse-Proxy or reverse-NAT). This is the case for this site, even the site has been rebooted it still would not show downtime on Netcraft becouse my front-end machine (Windows) is still running. Take a look at no.2 contender (www.orangesoft.co.jp). According to Netcraft it's been running for 3.5 years. I seriously doubt that. And DNS data confirms my allegations. WWW record, NS record, MX record for orangesoft.co.jp all of them pointing to the same IP address which usually a case in reverse-NATted installations.

About security. Some UNIX fanatics tend to claim that they invented Internet, they forgot to mention in this case then they also invented HTTP basic authentication, IMAP authentication, SNMP, telnet, POP3 and some other protocols relying on clear text. All those rudimentary protocols are still in use in production UNIX environments.

What authentication Win2000, Win2003 comes right out of the box? Kerberos 5. How do you authenticate to read your email? Kerberos. How do you administer services? Terminal Services on top of RDP using 128-bit encryption. IPsec is kernel mode driver in Win2000, Win2003. All you need to run in safe enviroment is in a box, you just need to configure it.

Here is interesting data: According to report released by AberdeenGroup Linux and open-source software "is now the major source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers". Linux and open source software accounted for 16 out of 29 advisories for 2002. Traditional UNIX software - 16. Windows - 7. So another "common knowledge" of UNIX and UNIX products is getting gradually demystified (Source). Another research from different company (Source) finds in most comprehensive study ever that "Linux has become the most breached 24/7 online computing environment".

About price. While OSS software is free to download, the rest of business lifecycle is not free. Once you account for personell training/hiring, support contract etc there is no common winner. TCO analysis down by either side of the camp (Windows or Linux) are usually biased to whoever paid for analysis. Here is recent article (link) which outlines that blindly jumping onto Linux wagon could possibly result in cost overruns and eventual migration to XP becouse it was found to be cheaper.

About market share. Common story told by UNIX fanatics is dominance of UNIX in web servers market. They rely their opinion on Netcraft survey of web sites (http://www.netcraft.com/). While if taking a look at total number of sites it appears so but majority of market which they are surveying are hosted websites which typically don't produce any kind of dynamic content. The story is quite different on business side. Another survey by the same company (http://www.netcraft.com/surveys/analysis/https/2001/Jan/CMatch/cnt_all.html ). IIS had 49% of the market of SSL powered servers and Apache had only 28% . The reason is that this statistics shows that business are actually choosing IIS and Windows over Apache/UNIX to host their applications. It goes further and following data from netfactual.com further proves IIS being a choice for ecommerce sites. To back it up even more here is data coming from port80software showing IIS is being used on 50% of Fortune 1000 companies http://www.port80software.com/servermask/top1000webservers/ . To go even further, since a lot of die-hard Apache fanatics pointing that Fortune 1000 companies has nothing to do with real life, Port80 Software decided to make a step a further and check 1000 highest traffic websites.  IIS again is leading (43% vs 39% for Apache).

Another lie from UNIX worshipper? UNIX and UNIX applications run faster then Microsoft . This remark usually comes without any prove and based on "common knowledge". So far I have not seen ANY data confirming this. Here is data showing Microsoft OS and applications superiority over UNIX for web servers (http://www.specbench.org/osg/web99/results/web99.html), for SQL servers (http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp).

People around you pushing J2EE in favour of .NET bragging and pointing out on stability and maturity of platform? Here is a survery of J2EE developers showing that average availability of J2EE application is 88% only. Which basically means that J2EE is down for 1 day in any given week.
Perfomance of application servers? Microsoft contacted third party company which does J2EE for living to compare J2EE to .NET solution. You might expect that company which does J2EE for living would do everything they can to make J2EE version as fast as possible, otherwise how would they sell their services to customers? Here is results of this perfomance benchmarks. Subsequent reruns of the same test (with participation of both camps in development) reaffirmed that .NET is more scalable and manageable then J2EE apps (Source)

Additional benchmark data can be found under resources.