The bMighty Blog -- Linux

A 2006 research study caused an uproar when it reported that Windows Server 2003 was more reliable than Linux. This year's results tell a somewhat different story -- at least in terms of which side wins the bragging rights.

The Yankee Group Server Reliability Survey polled over 700 enterprise IT users worldwide. As with most studies of this sort, the firm's research methodology is far from transparent, although it took pains to note that it employed "intrusion detection and authentication mechanisms" to prevent vote-tampering.

At any rate, the results aren't likely to cause nearly as much controversy as they did the last time around:

The top Linux distributions Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SuSE Linux notched the biggest reliability improvements in the latest 2007-2008 survey. Each decreased per server per annum downtime by an average of 75%. The biggest and most unwelcome surprise in the survey was that Windows Server 2003 downtime increased by 25% to nearly 9 hours of per server, per year downtime compared to the results it achieved in Yankee Group's 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey. Windows Server 2003's decreased reliability is attributable to a series of security alerts Microsoft issued in the summer and fall time frame which caused network administrators to take their Windows Server 2003 machines offline for significantly longer periods of time to apply remedial patches.

In the past two years, the Yankee Group polls indicated that all of the major server operating system platforms have achieved a much higher degree of reliability than they experienced in the prior decade. In general, none of the major server operating systems -- Linux, Macintosh, Windows or UNIX are today beset by the long list of bugs that plagued their predecessors back in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, there is far less disparity now, in the number and severity of unplanned server outages and the time that businesses experience on their standard Linux, Windows and UNIX platforms, than at any time in recent memory.

According to the survey, Unix is still the king of the hill: Companies that run IBM AIX or HP UX servers typically measure their downtime in minutes per year, rather than hours. Of course, most smaller companies don't need this level of performance -- and most of them certainly can't afford it, anyway.

It is interesting to note why Windows Server 2003 lost ground in this year's survey: Administrators spent more time patching security flaws than they did the previous year. On the other hand, we're still talking about less than two extra hours per year, on average. Just the fact that these kinds of differences are now so significant speaks volumes about just how much both Linux and Windows have improved over the past decade as server platforms.

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