News
 Will
Linux, Unix or Windows Dominate the Operating
Landscape?
What operating systems and infrastructure will be
the dominate force in the future? Will Unix and
Windows still reign supreme? A recent report from
the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) provides a
glimpse of what’s to come.
According to the IOUG report, Unix still reigns as
the operating system type of choice for running
Oracle databases and applications, the survey
confirms. At this time, 73 percent of the sites in
the survey run at least one of the major commercial
Unix flavors (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX). However, this
percentage will slip to 66 percent within the coming
year, respondents predict.
While Solaris, the flagship Unix operating system of
Sun Microsystems, currently dominates Oracle sites,
it will be sharing that top spot with Linux within
the next 12 months. The report also notes that
almost half of the Oracle sites run their systems on
Solaris, a number that is predicted to slip to 43
percent over the coming year. It remains to be seen
what impact the open sourcing of Solaris 10 (OpenSolaris)
will have on this market, since many have been
reassessing the total cost of ownership of high-end
Unix systems.
Linux continues to be a growth story within the
Oracle enterprise space, the survey confirms.
Currently, Linux is the third-place operating system
used within Oracle shops. By next year at this time,
44 percent of respondents say they will be running
Linux underneath their databases, pulling even with
and surpassing Solaris’ leadership. Oracle has
supported Linux since 1999, and the open source
operating system offers a viable,
hardware-independent alternative.
Recently, Oracle announced favorable performance
numbers for its 10g database supporting an ERP
workload on Linux, the report reveals. The vendor
announced that Oracle Real Application Clusters
running SAP R/3 Enterprise on Linux is the leading
result for SD Parallel benchmarks on Linux.
Oracle implementations on Microsoft Windows
platforms are likely to decline over the coming
year, the survey finds. In total, 60 percent of
respondents now run at least one version of Windows,
a percentage that will drop to 48 percent by next
year. Windows 2000 is still the current leader with
four out of 10 sites, a number that will quickly
drop to half that level within the next year.
However, it does not appear that these migrating
sites are going to Windows Server 2003, the current
server operating system. While more than a third of
Oracle systems already run on Windows 2003, this
percentage will not change over the next 12 months.
Interestingly, a respectable segment of respondents
still run their applications on Windows NT, an
operating system that Microsoft no longer actively
supports. Use of this older version of Windows is
likely to drop to a small handful by the next year,
however.
|
|
|
