UNIX VS Windows

[timmy90210]

With the new LTO2 drive speeds, Intel server hardware improvements and PCI-X and PCI-Express bus speeds along with 2GB fiber cards does UNIX still have the edge as a media server over Windows? Why?

Do you have any facts or benchmarks to prove this?

Does it matter what % of clients are NT/2000 vs UNIX that plays a role in the decision.

Any information or opinions are welcome.

Tim

 

[24carat]

UNIX still has the edge over Windows since it is more tweakable, Veritas netbackup was written for UNIX and therefoe there is a lot more support from the UNIX stand point.

 

[sysadmin666]

i just switched from unix servers to windows ( dl380, fast cpus). the windows boxes can sustain max drive throughput, the solaris boxes simply couldn't do this - i don't know if its a limitation of the driver. the cost of the windows boxes wouldn't even have bought another cpu for the unix box - so in value terms the new windows boxes are good value.

one downside - lack of command tools to maniplate reports - everything has to be done in perl.

 

[PGPhantom]

I find UNIX faster because you can tweak the buffer sizes to larger values than what Windows is capable of handling. I have identical drives in Unix and W2K and on an average and LTO drive in Unix sustains 15,000 KB/sec where on W2k it is only around 9,000.

I do, however, make one clarrification - This is for data coming to the media server from another client. On one W2K server where the backups are forced locally I get around 16,000 KB/sec.

 

[timmy90210]

sysadmin666, What are the hardware specs for your UNIX server?

Do you have some results you can post?

 

[Deano71]

This is in response to sysadmin666

Our Solaris boxes were always slower at the tape I/O than HPUX. Until recently when we upgraded some of the Sun servers (to V1280's I think), and now they are faster than HPUX. On the V1280's we get 60 MB/sec to a single STK 9940B tape drive. On the older Sun boxes, we rarely saw more than 20 MB/sec.

Our master is HPUX.