It is not an easy time to be a Unix server vendor, but at least it has stopped getting harder. According to the latest statistics from the box counters at IDC, worldwide sales of Unix servers was flat as a pancake, growing four-tenths of a percent to hit $3.8bn in revenues. That drops Unix from about half of revenues a decade …

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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 08:32 GMT Andy 18

Bad stats?

Personally, I find it's often cheaper to buy a Windows server and un-install Windows before popping a Unix OS on there. Probably related to the server distributors receiving a payment for each Windows box they ship. Not sure how that affects the statistics.

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1. Wednesday 2nd March 2011 09:56 GMT Adam 61
  
  erm no.....
  
  Andy 18,
  
  Working at said Server disty in a very large server franchise (HP) - we don't pre-install any OS unless its specifically asked for prior to shipment...and the servers don't come from the vendor pre-installed (again unless specifically asked and paid for).
  
  Sounds like someone has fed you a line to get you to pay for a Windows license maybe........
  
  That said I can't comment on what other disty's do and don't do
  
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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 09:47 GMT Quxy

Splitting hairs

But "servers with Linux ... saw a 29.3 per cent jump in revenues"?

So for all practical purposes, *nix actually grew _faster_ than all other platforms except for mainframes, right?

To those of us who aren't marketeers or bean-counters, there's more difference between different flavours of "UNIX" than between UNIX and Linux. Just think BSD vs. SysV...

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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 09:52 GMT Catweazle

linux == unix

unix is flat if you take out the flavour that rises. Great statistic!

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1. Wednesday 2nd March 2011 11:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  GNU
  
  GNU
  
  Gnu's
  
  Not
  
  Unix
  
  Linux is unix-like, it's not Unix, it's not a unix flavour, it's just not. This doesn't make it worse (or better) than Unix, it just makes it not Unix.
  
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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 11:17 GMT Anonymous Coward

Linux/Windows

I'm not supprised that big Unixes are not doing that well, I know of a few big companes who are dropping their RISC based big Unix systems (Solaris/HPUX/AIX) in favour of virtualising everything on Linux VMs, sharing their VM host machine with Windows VMs. Often this is augmented by z/Linux on z servers. The bang for buck of the big Unixes is dropping off very fast and is much less than is available for Intel boxes these days.

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1. Friday 4th March 2011 10:04 GMT Jesper Frimann
  
  Well yes.. but
  
  you have to remember that just staying flat actually means that a hell of a lot of more capacity have been shipped. POWER7 for example gives you around 4-5 times the CPU capacity for the same money, and SPARC and Itanium have at least doubled.
  
  Gee.. I sound all mainframe like :)=
  
  // jesper
  
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2. Sunday 6th March 2011 16:10 GMT Kebabbert
  
  zLinux problematic?
  
  People here say that zLinux is buggy and unstable. Can anyone confirm/deny?
  
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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 11:18 GMT Jim 59

linux == unix

Agree with catweazle. Having worked in unix for over 20 years, I always thought of Linux as just another unix flavour, and one of the most unixy flavours at that.

Where is visualization in this story ? Aren't we all just buying blades now, or using vmware to provision Red Hat ?

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Wednesday 2nd March 2011 12:49 GMT A J Stiles

Surely

Surely it's gone past the time to be counting Linux and Unix separately anymore?

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1. Wednesday 2nd March 2011 19:53 GMT Daniel B.
  
  For practical reasons, yes.
  
  Probably could use POSIX as an umbrella term for all Unix and Unix-like systems. The Unix separation mainly comes from:
  
  - UNIX being reserved for "genetic UNIX", those commercial systems are based on SysV.
  
  - The BSDites, that have weird things in their rc.d/init.d files and use the fugly /dev/ttyXX everyone else stopped using since the Unix98 PTY spec came out
  
  - The "Unix-like" OSen, of which Linux is the most known. Some purists insist to call this GNU/Linux, and the same purists will go up in flames if anyone were to call Linux "Unix".
  
  In reality, the GNU OS was never finished. Linus built a kernel and put the GNU tools over that, thus the GNU/Linux controversy began as GNU thinks that Linus Torvalds only built the kernel and thus didn't really make a full OS from scratch. Meh.
  
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  1. Wednesday 2nd March 2011 23:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Posix
    
    The problem with Posix indicating Unix is that if you install SFU on Windows, it becomes 100% (IIRC) Posix compliant. I wouldn't say that this made it a Unix box though, in the same way that if you sitck Wine onto a Linux box it's not a Windows machine.
    
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