Architecting Enterprise Solutions with UNIX Networking

Question: Discuss the microsoft operating systems instead of UNIX based operating systes? Answer: Operating Systems The decision to use Microsoft operating systems instead of UNIX based operating system for the companys Internet servers is wrong. More than 80% of the Internet servers are run the UNIX based operating systems and this is done for various reasons. There exist various factors that conclude that UNIX OSs eclipse Microsoft OSs in terms of their performance on Internet servers. First and foremost of all is Security. Security is pivotal in Internet servers. UNIX is innately more secure than Windows, be it on a server or in an embedded environment. This is in regard with the fact that UNIX was designed essentially to be a multiuser OS (Dedeke, 2009). Thus, only the administrator, or the root user, has administrative privileges, and users do not have the authority to access the kernel. Meanwhile, users of a Window OS can intentionally skin data from the administrator. Furthermore, UNIX OSs get attacked by viruses malwares less frequently than Microsoft OSs and it is faster and easier to de tect vulnerabilities in UNIX systems than in Microsoft systems. Second factor of UNIXs superiority over Microsoft is Stability. UNIX based systems are well applauded for their ability to perform for years without malfunctioning. Reports even suggest that some of the users have never experienced a crash in their history of usage of UNIX. Thus, UNIX systems are great for companies for which even a small downtime can have grave consequences. UNIX systems can also handle a large number of processes running at once much better than Windows (Microsoft OS); i.e. UNIX is better at multitasking than Microsoft OS. This tends to degrade Microsoft OSs stability quickly. Changes in configuration in Microsoft OSs generally requires a reboot (that results in downtime), whereas theres no need to reboot the UNIX system to make configuration changes, also it doesnt affect unrelated services like windows does. Moving from performance to costs, two important factors are Hardware and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). To accommodate Microsoft OSs ever increasing resource demands, it typically tends to require frequent hardware upgrades, whereas UNIX systems are slim, flexible and scalable, and perform admirably on almost all computers, regardless of their processor or infrastructure (Hong Rezende, 2012). UNIX systems can be easily reconfigured in order to include only the services that are required by the companys purposes, thus plummeting memory requirements and enhancing performance. There is no comparison to UNIX in terms of total cost of ownership as the OS is generally free. A normal Microsoft OS is more expensive than an enterprise UNIX OS purchased with corporate support as Microsoft OSs include user-based licensing and a cluster of other add-ons, specifically for security. Now coming to a rather supplementary advantage of UNIX systems over Microsoft systems, that being Freedom. With UNIX systems there arent any commercial merchants trying to commit you into some specific prod ucts. Instead the user is free to amalgamate and use whatever works best for the company. To conclude UNIX systems have the upper hand over Microsoft systems in the area of performance (security stability) as well as cost (hardware TCO). Viewing these advantages, its no wonder governments, corporations and big MNCs rely on the open source OS (UNIX) in their own servers (Blommers, 1999). Thus, it would be best for our company to use UNIX base servers rather than Microsoft OS on the companys servers for better performance and lower costs. UNIX based servers are a win-win. References Blommers, J. (1999).Architecting enterprise solutions with UNIX networking. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Dedeke, A. (2009). Is Linux Better than Windows Software?.IEEE Softw.,26(3), 104-104. doi:10.1109/ms.2009.72 Hong, S., Rezende, L. (2012). Lock-in and unobserved preferences in server operating systems: A case of Linux vs. Windows.Journal Of Econometrics,167(2), 494-503. doi:10.1016/j.jeconom.2011.09.031