I had an old version that I bought in 2000 and never got around to playing with. I think it is 7 something but I would have to go dig it out to look again to get the exact version. It loaded fine other than we had to use support to get it loaded.
Here is how we see the Operating system choice so far.
Goods Microsoft
1. Our network is completly Microsoft
2. All disaster recovery and Backup plans are based around Microsoft.
3. Everyone on staff has at least their MCSE.
4. Microsoft is extremly familiar and handles everything we need to handle
5. Up time is very high. In the 4 years it has been up we have had only 1 reboot due to power outage and UPS draining completly.
Negitives Microsoft
1. Security updates. Annoying and mandatory to keep a secure system. Seems everyday.
2. Heavy on mandatory services
3. Easily influenced and infected by virus's from desktops.
Linux Positives (As we see so far)
1. No security Updates
2. Services as light as you want to make them
3. Low disk space for OS
Linux Negitives
1. No experiance on staff
2. Very cumbersome and almost seemingly a work in progress rather than finished product. (probably due to lack of experiance and being familiar with Microsoft)
3. Does not really like existing completly on existing network such as policies and information transfer.
To make the move to Linux we would need to justify a signifigant performance increase in speed of serving datasets, ease of administration, and portability to developers. Currently with 8i we haven't seen anything that sticks out in better performance.
Finally we have 500 users that access the database and it seems to be growing from year to year. 2000 users would ways off. All together with consultants cost, hardware, and software we figure about $80,000.00 to make the move from 8i to 10g. We hope it is a bit high but its best to have it then ask for it later.
