I don't believe the Linux vs windows server market share numbers.
My current company has about 40 linux servers and 3 windows. My previous company had 1 windows server to 5 linux. The one before that was a similar ratio.
I'm looking around online to see how IDC collected/calculated this data but
can't see anything that actually says. The only thing I can think of is if
they are taking commercial unixes like redhat and suse and comparing them
against windows. If that is the case these numbers are beyond worthless due to
the fact that most linuxs end up being centos, debian, ubuntu or other free
distros.
I was thinking the same thing; Apache has double the marketshare on the web, and all the computationally intensive plays that I know of use Linux or BSD clusters on the backend. Google alone has somewhere over a million boxes, Amazon isn't exactly tiny, neither is Facebook, and most of the banks that I know of are still Big Iron on the backend.
I think Windows Server has a large market share in medium size businesses. Note: they didn't specify "web" server. They didn't specify much. Who knows, maybe they count google as one server?
Also, I sometimes think the experiences of us here may be out of touch with what most ordinary businesses do.
I couldn't see linux units mentioned there, nor their methodology, or definition of "server".
EDIT2 The bottom of the press release: includes quarterly shipments (both ISS and upgrades) and revenues (both customer and factory), segmented by vendor, family, model, region, operating system, price band, CPU type, and architecture. Doesn't really help, but there's also a phone number and email address.
These numbers almost assuredly are based on "units shipped" which means you only count a Linux sale if someone orders a server from Dell or HP and requests a RH or Suse Linux license with it, rather than a Windows Server 2008 license or the default.
Because, as others have mentioned, the vast majority of large webhosts or Linux users "roll their own free distro" or purchase an enterprise agreement from RH or Suse, they will never be counted.
Microsoft always plays games with the numbers. They are playing a similar game with Windows 7 numbers - You can buy a Windows 7 upgrade for $99, which only gives you a single license, or you can buy a "family upgrade pack" for $99, which gives you 3 upgrade licenses.
Guess which one allows them to count 3x the number of licenses sold? Right, and they made it so that the family pack can even upgrade pirated versions of XP (I know this because I used this to bring one of my home copies up to legit status). It's a genius marketing move because for basically $33 per computer they get all the pirate computers to become fully legit, counted installs of Windows.
Never mind all the double-counting and triple-counting of licenses - MS has always been king at this. They force Dell/HP to bundle a license of Windows 7 with every computer sold knowing that corporations have Volume License Keys and wipe and reinstall Windows with their corp version. 2 copies of Windows sold for every physical computer.
What I would really like to see are the numbers of Windows computers receiving updates. That would be a legitimate number.
> I sometimes think the experiences of us here may be out of touch with what most ordinary businesses do
Not necessarily ... at least not in Europe where I live ... if you're a consultant that gets hired, try explaining to a client that they need to also buy a Windows Server license (or several); or pay extra per instance (in the case of cloud computing like EC2).
Apache works on Windows too! In my experience, most companies ditched IIS for Apache because it was better. Not to mention a lot of companies building web products for Windows that build on Apache.. That would increase Apache usage numbers too.
Web Server share is definately going to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if you could flip those numbers (20% Win, 70%+ Linux)
Server encompasses a much bigger sphere than 'web-server'. It's in the back room of your local council, the car parts company with a few stores across a couple of states, and all those damn sharepoint installs..
It sounds like they're only counting SALES of Linux machines - e.g. bought at Dell or whatnot. I'd assume that means the true 80% number of Linux machines that exist is very difficult to determine. Most of the servers at my company (40+, plus a TON of VMs) are Linux and I'd bet most companies that manage large farms of servers are similar.
Anecdotal evidence isn't to be trusted. You haven't seen much Windows in your world, I've seen very little linux in mine.
A finance firm with over $50bn under management had over 300 Windows servers and maybe a dozen linux machines. Mostly security appliances, firewalls, etc.
A law firm with offices across the globe has over 600 Windows servers and not more then 2 dozen linux machines. Again, mostly security appliances.
Having worked at both these places I can assure you that the licensing fees are a rounding error in the overall expense budget.
They might be even comparing licenses, which makes it even worse. If an enterprise uses Redhat, dollars to donuts they stage things on CentOS before they ever spend a dime. That wouldn't show up either.
Well your combined 49 servers must be a solid representation of the entire market.
Also, "server" can mean a lot of things, more than just "box that serves up websites". Fortune 500s often have a giant slew of them just serving email to employees.
What I'm trying to get at is the percents (70% windows vs 25% linux) seem very counter intuitive. Microsoft links to another company who provides little to no information about how they are making their claims.
Well, if we're doing the anecdotal thing, then I'll be happy to back up mr. maroon. My current contract is with one of those Fortune 500 companies. I work in server ops, and am very much aware of what we have.
There are a couple of thousand servers, across three DCs, a mix of HPUX, Solaris, and Windows.
Not one Linux server. Maybe there's a few dozen running in VMs on developer's workstations, but even they tend to prefer Solaris, since that's their target, anyway.
At this scale, nobody really cares about the licensing costs of an OS. There's no reason not to buy RedHat, if only to keep the PHBs happy.
OS license costs are a smidgen, a rounding error, damn near nothing compared to the costs associated with standing them up, not to mention development, ongoing operations, etc. I'm pretty sure our storage costs, per month, exceed all the money we've spent on licenses in the last year (if not longer).
I also know of a lot of small businesses which have nothing but Windows. I know of few that have even heard of Linux. I'm talking about every law office, every doctor's office, every real-estate office...well, you get the idea.
I like Linux. I've been running it on servers and desktops of my own for over about fifteen years (since the 1.x kernel). I seldom see it in the field.
Since we're comparing anecdotal evidence, for the past 10 years I've been contracting at all manner of large banks, finance companies, telcos, payment processors, and healthcare. They are overwhelmingly using Linux, and mostly Red Hat, in their data centers now. In the early 2000s it was mostly Solaris on Sparc on the back end, but in the last 10 years it has switched to mostly Linux on x86-64, with a smattering of Solaris 10 to run "legacy" applications.
Of course they also run Windows, but it's only for Exchange, Windows file servers, and Active Directory for desktops.
Your environment running only HPUX, Solaris, and Windows, is far from the norm. Linux is widely supported, and most importantly, cheap, compared to HPUX or Solaris (running on custom hardware like Itanium or Sparc).
Especially with cloud offerings. It just dawned on me that there are a ton of people who are able to set up and run a VPS/Cloud instance with only a command line interface. That's really comforting.
I'm not sure of the context of those numbers. Not in direct business ratios but I'm not sure how they count VM instances. FYI this is said while I work in STB (Server Tools and Business).
Sure, maybe MS won't ever win in servers or smart phones.
Will the PC just die and give way to these?
Not likely, not while most WORK is done with client PCs. How many mid-level bureaucrats are going to be banging away on their IPADS?? five years from now? How much is the client side worth? Lots. WORK? Companies? Sure, big areas that isn't MS has opened up. But the PC is going to be an ocean for a long time and MS, if anything, is cementing it's control of that. I'm no MS booster - I'd like to see a real Linux desktop but I can see MS is better positioned on the desktop than three years ago.
My current company has about 40 linux servers and 3 windows. My previous company had 1 windows server to 5 linux. The one before that was a similar ratio.
I'm looking around online to see how IDC collected/calculated this data but can't see anything that actually says. The only thing I can think of is if they are taking commercial unixes like redhat and suse and comparing them against windows. If that is the case these numbers are beyond worthless due to the fact that most linuxs end up being centos, debian, ubuntu or other free distros.