JC -
I do a lot of work on all three - and if the configurations are controlled to "known reliable" stuff, all three can deliver very good reliability, in the range of 99.5% or better.
When one goes outside of that box, Linux reliability is somewhat hampered by the big variations in quality of code - it depends a lot on who wrote it and whether they were both competent and interested in doing a quality job. NT covers a wider range of stuff in a pretty clean manner - the market volumes mean that IHVs and ISVs want to have good stuff for NT - but there is currently no process which says that the DLLs and drivers supplied by an IHV, for example, will not break either the OS or, more likely, some other third party stuff. That is what driver signing and DLL isolation are supposed to solve, we'll see how well it works.
Solaris for X86 suffers from lower interest among IHVs - drivers are either non-existent, or much later than NT and Windows versions. Sun does seem to exercise a little better control over what gets used, especially in production environments, but I mostly run across the X86 flavor in accounts which already have a big SPARC Solaris presence, so the staff understands how to work with it.
So I would say for carefully controlled systems, all three OS flavors are pretty reliable, and when you go outside the box, all three start to break down, but for different reasons. |
