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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Windows Server share growing at Linux expense?
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Windows Server share growing at Linux expense? | Windows Server share growing at Linux expense? |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Saturday, 27 October 2007 | |
  
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In the case of Linux, a substantial proportion (it's hard to say much) of server deployments which are not included in IDC figures are on recycled computers, vanilla boxes without any operating system pre-installed and in virtual environments where Linux is a guest operating system. On that last point, it is a widely acknowledged fact that in most organizations servers are massively under-utilized hardware. There has been a push among enterprises looking to cut power bills and administrative overheads to reduce the number and consolidate their under-utilized server boxes using virtualization systems such as VMware and XenSource. There is evidence to suggest that Linux is featuring heavily in such deployments, although it is true that many Windows server sites tend to stick with the devil they know. So what is the IDC report really measuring? In a sentence, the shipment of new x86 server hardware with pre-installed operating systems. In that market, Windows Server is outpacing Linux but the growth is steady rather than spectacular. If there is one thing that the IDC report does highlight, however, it is the challenge now facing the Linux server vendors such as Red Hat and Novell. Both vendors have acknowledged in the past that Windows server sites are difficult to shift and both have built their businesses largely on converting Unix sites. Windows lock-in - or intertia as some prefer to call it - appears to be as much a problem in the server market as the desktop. However, now that Linux has carved out a 20% market share, is there any evidence from IDC to suggest that Microsoft is converting Linux sites to Windows? Finally, whenever we get one of these reports on the state of play of IT in the US it is tempting to extrapolate it to the rest of the world. Yet Microsoft, while still dominant on the desktop, has a harder time in markets outside the US. For instance, IE7 is still the dominant Web browser in the US but Firefox has almost reached parity in many parts of Europe and other regions. It would be interesting to see what the IDC x86 server deployment figures are for Europe (including Eastern Europe), Asia and South America. In all of these regions, recent reports indicate that Linux is making gains in the desktop space - particularly in growth markets like Russia and China. Is there any evidence from IDC to suggest that in these markets the story is different in the server space? |
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