Posted on Wednesday, June 07 2006 @ 13:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Additional key results for the independent, non-sponsored Yankee Group 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey show that on average, individual corporate Linux, Windows and Unix servers experience three to five failures per server per year, resulting in 10.0 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server. In addition, standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux and niche open source vendors gained more outage time compared to Windows or Unix competitors. Yankee Group determined a significant portion of this outage time is attributed to the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation compared to the more mature, established operating systems. Underlying these findings is the crucial point that TCO metrics such as reliability, performance, security and management ultimately depend on an individual company’s implementation.
"All of the server operating system platforms have demonstrated improved reliability, performance and management services," said Laura DiDio, Yankee Group Application Infrastructure & Software Platforms research fellow. "However, corporations must implement and strictly adhere to best practices in training, testing and configuration to ensure optimal server operating system performance and application reliability."
In addition, the Yankee Group 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey highlights IT management practices and trends to assist corporate users in deciding which individual server OS or heterogeneous combination best fits their respective environments. Although the uptime and dependability of all server operating systems have remarkably improved in the past 3 to 5 years, an individual corporation must employ best deployment practices with respect to configuration, management and security to realize a lower TCO and a higher ROI on its software infrastructure.
