JC - got the book today - bought from AllDirect - I'll probably read it this weekend. Looks interesting, good style.
RE: "Trusted Windows" - NT4 has the advantage of being a known quantity. In areas where the application mix and characteristics have been beaten on for several years, and performance and headroom are adequate, there is little reason to change - most IT shops would first work on something that is broken. Three are a lot of controlled configurations of NT4 showing 99.9 and a bunch showing 99.99, but like any installation aiming for anything better than 99%, IT procedures play the major role.
While on a percentage basis, the number of highly reliable NT installations may be small, the absolute numbers are actually pretty impressive. When we realize that the absolute number of midrange and high end SUNW servers shipped in a year is about what the Wintel guys ship in a week, they only need to have a 1% hit rate on highly reliable installations to match SUNW's numbers in absolute terms.
However, even IT shops which have good numbers and a major commitment to NT regard the management of those systems to attain high availability as a difficult chore. Most folks (myself included) regard the setup and administration of a Solaris system as an opportunity to spend some enjoyable technical time looking at the way other smart people chose to go after a solution, whereas the same task on an NT system is more likely to create frustration with the things which don't work consistently, don't work as advertised, or sometimes just don't work. Kind of like the difference between working on my Lotus and working on my brother's Camero Z28 - they are both pretty fast, but when I look at the odd things the Lotus engineers do, I can usually figure out why they did it that way, and usually learn something in the process. On the Camero, what I mostly learn is that shaving a few cents here and a few cents there creates a lot of places where I just have to say "why would anyone have done it this way???" and the answer is almost always that it made it cheaper to build... and harder to work on and repair. |
