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The Linux distillery Microsoft arguments against Linux are bollocks
The Linux distillery Microsoft arguments against Linux are bollocks | Microsoft arguments against Linux are bollocks |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 28 April 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 We’re there! It took a couple of clicks from the first tantalising, titillating and tempting headline but the two-page Word document vomits forth the story.There’s certainly no ambiguity over what HiChina did to achieve their goals. The quote by the Technical Director is re-iterated and the introductory paragraph cuts to the chase, “The company experienced performance and reliability challenges, and its customers increasingly sought Windows-based hosting services. HiChina deployed Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services 7.0, which will help the company improve network performance and reduce costs.” Not only do we know what platform they chose but once again the Linux/UNIX heritage is implied by saying the customers were giving impetus for change. Obviously, if the customers wanted Windows then there must have been a non-Windows platform. Or, so you’d think. The bottom of the first page says, “HiChina had been using Web server computers based on both UNIX and the Windows Server 2003 operating system to host solutions for its customers.” Hang on! Windows Server 2003? Just like we saw before, the content tells that the infrastructure previously was heterogeneous despite all the rhetoric and spin directly stated and implied in the headlines and captions. But get this, not only were Windows computers in the mix, how much of the performance bottlenecks can be attributed to the UNIX side? Let’s read on. “The company used Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, a Web platform for applications and services, to host customer Web sites. Each HiChina Web server computer hosted approximately 150 dynamic customer Web sites based on ASP.NET.” Apache wasn’t used. Nor any other UNIX or Linux based web server. In fact, I don’t even know now what the UNIX computers were used for but it sure wasn’t the hosting which proved to be a bottleneck. All the customer web sites were ASP.NET applications running under IIS – and therefore on the Windows servers. Here’s where the problem hit, “HiChina had been experiencing performance and reliability issues,” they say. They attempted some solutions – “We created an individual Application Pool for each Web site on the server,” – which is specifically an IIS approach. This didn’t fix things, “When the server had been running for several days, some of those sites began to respond slowly. Because of that, we lost some business opportunities.” So, IIS was the bottleneck. And attempts to improve things were based on IIS. But didn’t the case study tell us the customers were wanting Windows solutions? Doesn’t this mean they were using UNIX web hosts? Well, no. The case study goes on to reveal that customers did want Windows solutions, that’s true. Which is why HiChina wanted to make IIS work. It’s not that they provided a UNIX platform and customers said, “This is rubbish, put me on Windows” but rather customers wanted Windows so HiChina had to try and make Windows work. To my mind, the direct implication of the case study is that HiChina may not have actually persevered with IIS had they the freedom to consider other platforms. Rather than this being a case study of a company having difficulties with UNIX and then finding out Windows worked better for them the case study instead tells of a company fighting to make Windows work reliability and being constrained to use Windows. Happily, HiChina did roll out Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 and they did yield greater reliability and greater performance and they have cut costs and no doubt made their customers happier. That’s great news for HiChina. But what are Microsoft PR thinking? It’s an insult to their readers to pitch this as a Windows vs Linux case study. That’s an entire fabrication. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s simply a story that if you have to stick with Windows, the latest version works better than the last. And that’s all.
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