[ Thanks to Michael
S. Mimoso for this link. ]
“Make any comparison between the reliability, scalability and
total cost of ownership (TCO) of Microsoft Windows 2000 and Linux,
and someone’s bound to object. ‘The areas of scalability,
reliability and TCO are highly subjective and emotional,’ said John
H. Terpstra, CEO/President of PrimaStasys, Inc., an IT mentoring
and consulting firm, and an Ask the Expert advisor for
SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Even so, Terpstra–co-founder of the
Samba-Team–accepted SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s challenge to take
an objective look at the performance and costs of file and print
serving on Windows 2000 as compared to Linux with the Samba open
source file and print server software. In this interview, Terpstra
points out why IT shops can overrule any objections made by
Microsoft.“IT shops want to know if Linux and Samba can match the
scalability of Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and its print and file
servers. Can the Linux/Samba team make the grade in enterprise
environments?“Terpstra: Every system has inherent design
limitations that become its bottleneck. Generally speaking, the
slowest component that is involved in the services being evaluated
will be the primary limiting factor in the benchmarks obtained.
Workloads that are used to measure scalability should be reflective
of the type of work that the file server will be expected to
handle…”