The Inquirer: TCO Study Has Lessons for Unix and Linux

“In early December 2003 we reported on a Techwise Research study
into the total cost of ownership (TCO) of various configurations of
clusters. Unlike many other reports about TCO, this report took
into account the cost of downtime and examined the major reasons
for that lost time.

“The earlier report to which we referred was somewhat dated but
just a few weeks ago Techwise Research updated their report after
interviews with 94 US companies who used either HP’s OpenVMS on
Alphaservers, IBM’s AIX on p-series machines or Sun’s Solaris on
Sun Fire clusters. Their study looked at clusters of machines with
up to 16 processors and that had been in production use for more
than 6 months and the representation by manufacturers was almost
equal.

“The new report is quite detailed in its discussion of the TCO
of clusters of different processing powers but our interest here
lies only with general findings and with the average downtime for
each of the three types of cluster that are reported on…”

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