Well, now the fun part comes. A typical Red Hat Linux distribution is, what people would call a "Linux". Software, that runs on Linux is "Linux software". Oracle is Linux software.
The good thing about Linux is, that you can replace every single part with a commercial component if you want. Many people exchange the kernel with FreeBSD (Web servers), Sun Solaris, HP Unix etc. The same business software that runs on Linux also runs on Sun Solaris. No company would ever demand a Linux kernel on a server, if something else would be better.
And yes, there are plenty of Unix servers out there running serious software. If you start with a 32MB RAM Linux server with an SQL-server (Oracle, Interbase), you can upgrade to pretty big Unix machines. This is, what companies actually do. I don't want to do research for you about finding which companies actually do transactions on Linux - but I'm sure the Oracle sales department or Interbase Corp. would like to point out a few for you. A single Linux server still has better uptime than Windows NT. According to IBM and, I think, Gartner Group, a typical NT server is not accessible 240 hours a year in average, for several reasons. As far as I remember, the figures for Linux were 30 hours. The main reason for downtime with the servers I have set up is lack of airconditioning and somebody pulling the power plug. I've never had downtime because of software upgrades.
I didn't say anything else than that those 4000 computers at Google were doing webcrawling, but that's not quite the truth. There are 4000 computers, that get web-pages, analyze these, evalutate pages based on other pages and provides this to the end-user. It's a rather complicated system, and it's a real life system. You asked for example, you got it. Now you don't like the example and ask for another. You could probably go on for a very long time...
Of course, you could do this with Windows. The fact is, though, nobody does this on Windows. You don't see 4000 computers working together on a task in the Windows world, unless it's some kind of technical demo. |
