Реферат: Linux And Windows NT Essay Research Paper

unfixed bugs, high prices for technical employees who make things go, and extra

machines and software as the site grows. There’s a notable lack of consensus as

to whether Linux or NT delivers a lower total cost of ownership. TCO, as the

bean counters call it, is one of those numbers derived more from bookkeeping

than science, so it’s easy for two companies to report wildly different results.

I found that most everyone thinks their system is the right one, price-wise.

More interesting is that they consider the biggest cost advantages to be faster

turnaround time for solving problems and getting new features launched and not

the lower price tag. It doesn’t matter how good your Web site is if it’s down or

so slow that surfers hit their Back buttons. When it comes to staying up instead

of locking up, Linux got high praise from everyone I talked with. NT owners were

notably less enthusiastic about its reliability but pointed out that on a larger

site, a load balancing device such as Cisco Local Director can hide downtime by

sending traffic to other servers while one reboots. Several managers said the

more frequent reboots were an acceptable cost compared to, say, hiring pricey

Unix Administrators. Scalability is a word that gets thrown around a lot,

especially when beating up on Microsoft. In IT jargon, it means the ability to

increase the size of a system in such a way that the associated overhead costs -

hardware, downtime, administration work – go down in proportion to the overall

size of the system, instead of staying the same or going up. If your Web site’s

traffic grows by a factor of 10 in the next year, ideally, you should only have

to pay for the extra hardware that the traffic passes through, keeping all other

costs the same. This is why Internet companies have such huge potential profits

compared to, say, newspapers. But NT gets a lot of flak for not being as

scalable as a Unix system. Linux advocates were outspoken about its superior

scalability. NT owners don’t necessarily agree. They point out that NT systems

need to be scaled differently than Unix systems. Also, scaling large systems

requires expertise as well as the right parts. For sites less high profile than

these, though, getting the right staff, hired guns, or vendor support to plan