"Vendor lock-in is great for the vendor, but not as much for the IT shop. In this article we focus on the infrastructure side of IT, exploring how enterprise-grade services can be had for drastically reduced costs, or even for free.
"x86 Commercial Off-the-Shelf Hardware
Are you still running Oracle on proprietary Sun SPARC hardware? How about SAS on large, expensive IBM POWER servers? Now is the time to test these applications, and realize the performance gain, on more "commodity" hardware.
A pair of quad-core Intel Xeon processors will simply amaze you, and at a fraction of the cost. Switching architectures is never easy, but know that most everyone supports your most critical applications on Linux with x86, including the two examples we mentioned above. The performance gains alone are enough, but wait, there's more."
