SunSpot - I finally understand your point about full duplex... interesting, I had never run across that.
I really look forward to the day, when Microsoft delivers an operating system, that can run 24 hours a day even when installing programs and doing other kinds of maintenance. Windows 2000 isn't such a product. Linux is.
When running a 4-node W2K cluster, you can take any server, or any 2 servers, down for any reason - maintenance, upgrade, software installation - without dropping service and without losing failover backup capability. I have also done work with Beowulf clusters and Linux, which provide pretty much the same capability.
There are of course a lot of applications where cluster capability is not there, and in those cases the ability of the OS to support relatively transparent installation and upgrade of applications and components is important. But with W2K we can change pretty much anything in the hardware except video, processors and memory - hot swap of disk controllers, nics, and pretty much anything else that can be plugged in, on-line volume expansion, etc. I have done a fair amount of work in that regard with both W2K and Linux and W2K has MUCH more capability in that regard.
W2K also allows transparent loading and unloading of any application which is sufficently well-behaved, and as more developers write apps designed specifically for the W2K environment, more will fall into that category. This is really a question of what the developers do, not what MSFT does. There are lots of Unix applications which will not load or unload transparently on Linux...
I think Linux is a fine product for applications that are well defined, and don't need big hardware to run, since Linux does not scale well beyond 2 processors... but I am just confused by the rest of your post on Linux. Linux does not have any of the RAS or system administration tools required for big time enterprise use aside from large numbers of "fixed function" servers such as we see with the Linux/ Apache combo. What you are saying seems more applicable to Solaris, and even Solaris is not in the RAS league of the heavy hitters like IBM and Tandem. |
