Comments on: For Dell, industry standard now includes Linux

Open-source OS now accounts for a quarter of Dell's enterprise business and is growing fast, the company says.

[Dachi]

Misleading statements

"Linux now accounts for more than a quarter of what Dell sells, Parker said"

I highly doubt this statement is correct. I think what you meant to say is that they are a quarter of enterprise server sales.

This not the same as saying Linux is quarter of enterprise sales, and _definately_ not the same as saying a quarter of all sales

[Hernys]

Not only that...

But considering that most servers go to companies that have licencing agreements with Microsoft, and that those units most likely include the $0 Red Hat (no preinstallation) option, that means many of those Linux servers are going to be installed as Windows servers by the purchaser.

[Zymurgist]

Your probaby right, but...

I work for a very large biotech company and we have hundreds (perhaps tens of hundreds -- my compute cluster alone is 150 nodes) of Dell servers and only about 30 of them run Windows. There were previously more, but our Notes servers were migrated to Linux as well. We tend to buy HP with Windows XP (which we overwrite with Win2K) for desktops, but all research workstations are Dells with RHEL4 -- so 100% of our Dell desktops are Linux based.

FWIW - you don't get a discount for Linux from Dell, so the idea that you buy Linux and install Windows is silly; it ends up costing you more that way.

Of course, I have quite a few friends and colleagues at other biotech/pharma companies and the situation is quite similar at those places too. So, in that market segment, Dell likely does a lot more than 25% Linux sales overall.

I would imagine SMB sales are virtually 100% Windows, and large financial companies (we've hired developers from many of them in the Northeast) are probably 100% Windows on the desktop, and 50-50 on the server side (seems most of our Java contractors coming from Fortune 100 companies were working with Linux or migrating to Linux environments when they left).

[styxs1]

Unix to Windows

IDC has recently come out and said that Windows is the leading platfrom for migrating Unix servers vs Linux. The perception that most Unix customers are moving to Linux is just wrong.
http://www.crncanada.ca/content/systems/microsoft-eases-unix-migr.shtml

[Get_Bent]

Take that "study" with a grain of salt...

IDC Says Ex-Unix Shops Love Windows More Than Linux
http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb040406-story01.html

"Microsoft commissioned two reports from IDC, one in 2003 and another late last year, to find out what Unix shops were up to when it came to migrating their applications to other platforms."

When a vendor commissions a "study" that makes them look good, that makes me suspicious of the results -- they may be accurate, or they may be intentionally skewed. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that Microsoft paid for the study taints its findings. If the study had shown that Linux was the preferred upgrade path, would we even _see_ this info? No. Microsoft would have buried it.

[styxs1]

Unix to Windows

IDC has recently come out and said that Windows is the leading platfrom for migrating Unix servers vs Linux. The perception that most Unix customers are moving to Linux is just wrong.
http://www.crncanada.ca/content/systems/microsoft-eases-unix-migr.shtml