Interesting wrt switching from IIS to Solaris as web server

[Peter]

While researching something I happened upon this interesting Netcraft 
output page. It represents the uptime of the website of nec.com which 
seems to have switched from IIS to Solaris sometime in 2003:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.nec.com

Their uptime went up almost tenfold. for reference, here is the same 
record for microsoft:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.microsoft.com

which shows that the times resulting from the nec site may not be an 
accident. None of these run Apache so I found a site that does and it 
compares favorably with the solaris uptime:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.canon.com

SCO, who is suing everyone for running Linux, uses it copiously for its 
own needs all the time (in fact, they never said it was bad, they said 
it was *too* good):

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.sco.com

Akamai (whom m$ uses to serve ads and many content pages), Yahoo, 
Hotmail, NYT, you name it, most run Apache. Even IBM runs Apache on AIX.

In general, with the exception of a few borg affiliates (dell, compaq - 
whose laptops are notorious for driver problems when running linux), and 
a few (non-us! - because most us government sites seem to run Apache!) 
government websites, there is no IIS on the web. Excepting for the 
unexpected:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.af.mil

IIS on Linux ?! <grin> Probing further, army.mil is a Mac shop (on Mac 
OS X) and the us navy runs IIS on Linux. The usmc runs IBM lotus domino 
on something secret.

Now, knowing this, how come there are so many websites that require an 
Explorer compatible browser for viewing ?!

Otherwise: How about a comparison of coo based on price/day uptime and
price/page served (including OS and hardware costs). Each of these 
factors could be assigned a figure of merit and a general score 
attained. IIS vs Apache looks about like so:

 			them	us

OS+Software:

 	Win 2003 Server	$1500				1

 	Linux/Freebsd,
 	boxed w. CDs		$70~$100		1

Hardware (1CPU 2x120G HDD, rack case, dual psu, good network card, dual fans etc:

 			$1200				0
 				$1200

Product lifetime (how long until you need a major upgrade):

 			<2 years
 				4-5 years (ex: running Apache 1.3 server
 				on 2.2 kernel is still a valid option)

Uptime (acc netcraft figures), also represents cost of labor in soft 
repairs and downtime, probably valid for a small server with medium 
traffic:

 			~100days			200 * 365/N (*)
 				~300days

Over 4 years:

 			1200+2*1500+4*2*365=7120$
 				1200+70+4*200/300*365=2243$

(*) = represents the cost of each downtime in hours of labor ~= 2 hours 
per downtime = 2*100$. Other costs are neglected.

This means:

Initial investment (w/o labor):
 			2700$
 				1270$

Running cost per year, labor only:
 			730$ year 1,2
 			2230$ year 3 (upgrade OS)
 			730$ year 4

 				133$

Network and bandwidth costs are assumed to be the same. How come these 
things can be compared at all ?! Or am I way off the mark ? Here is a 
comment on Sun prices (April 2004):

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=ACCFFD14-E4A3-46A6-B32C-B118A73667CF

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml