Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition
Unix systems are particularly popular at Internet service
providers and increasingly complicated Web sites that handle
electronic commerce, where reliability, security and ease of
maintenance are paramount. Consider the experience of
TheStreet.com, a financial-news Internet site in New York City,
which earlier this year replaced its Windows NT servers with
Sun servers running that company's Solaris brand of Unix.
Dan Woods, chief technology officer at the company, said the NT systems were slower than the new Sun machines, prone to crash under heavy Internet traffic, and difficult to administer even with a large technical support staff. "When we'd get to a certain load level, NT would totally fall apart, and the whole machine is dead," says Mr. Woods. "Unix, when it gets to a certain level, response times go up, but everyone eventually gets through, and the machine doesn't blow up." Microsoft
declined to comment on TheStreet.com's experience.
...
"This is not the end, this is just a place in time," Mr. Allchin says. "We'll all have jobs for a long time improving this thing.
And that may prove to be an understatement.
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