To build a good and stable network is extremely difficult. It takes a team of very knowledgeable engineers to put together a system that will provide the best service and will forfill the need for the companies users and clients. There are many issues that have to be resolved and many choices have to be made. The toughest choices IT managers have to make, are what will be the best server platform for their environment. Many questions must be answered. Which server software offers complete functionality, with easy installation and management?
Which one provides the highest value for the cost? What kind of support and performance can be expected from this system? And most important of all is what is more secure? In this paper, Microsoft Windows NT Server is compared to UNIX, in the large commercial environment. The main focus of the comparison is on the areas of, reliability, compatibility, administration performance and security. Which system is worth the money? What can you expect from Windows NT Server out of the box and from UNIX out of the box?
NT can communicate with many different types of computers. So can UNIX. NT can secure sensitive data and keep unauthorized users off the network. So can UNIX. Essentially, both operating systems meet the minimum requirements for operating systems functioning in a networked environment. Put briefly, UNIX can do anything that NT can do and more. Being over 25 years old, the UNIX design has been crystallized out further than any other operating system on a large scale. NT is fairly new and some say it is a cheap rip off of UNIX. But it is not cheap at all.
To purchase an NT server with 50 Client Access Licenses , one will spend $4,859. 00. Not so bad. But it gets much more costly than this. This price is just for software, but everyone knows to build a network you need a lot more than this. E-mail has become an indispensable tool for communication. It is rapidly becoming the most popular form of communication. With Windows NT, you will have to buy a separate software package in order to set up an e-mail server. Many NT-based companies use Microsoft Exchange as theyre mailing service.
It is a nice tool, but an expensive solution with not such great success in the enterprise environment. Microsoft Exchange Server Enterprise Edition with 25 Client Access Licenses costs $3,549. 00. UNIX operating systems come with a program called Sendmail. There are other mail server software packages available for UNIX, but this one is the most widely used, and it is free. Some UNIX administrators feel that exim or qmail are better choices since they are not as difficult to configure as sendmail.
Both exim and qmail, like sendmail as well, are free, they are very stable but not very user friendly, and may not be the best choice for a company with a lot of users that are not computer oriented. So why do people choose NT? NT is often chosen because many customers are not willing to pay for the more expensive hardware required by most commercial flavors of UNIX. More important, however, is the overall cost of implementation which includes system administration along with several other factors like downtime, telephone support calls, loss of data due to unreliability.
Unlike Unix, Windows NT Server can handle only one task well; so more systems are needed to support users. What about manpower? What is it going to cost to support these systems? Because NT 4. 0 lacks an enterprise directory on the scale of other systems, it requires more administrators to manage it in large enterprises. UNIX based networks require much less men power to maintain that NT. Both systems are able to run automated tasks, but running them is only useful when the scripts/tasks/executables can be run without human intervention.
So much that runs on NT is GUI-based, and thus, requires interaction with a human administrator. I guess this kind of defeats the purpose. NT servers lack remote control and scripting capabilities (it must be purchased through a third party vendors), and their instability requires rebooting once or twice per week. This equals more monitoring and most importantly downtime. The estimated cost for setting up NT network in 1000 user environment including hardware, software and network management, would total about $900,000 for the first year.
Annual cost of management, maintenance and salaries for a Windows NT Server network would be around $670,000. Is there much difference in design? NT is often considered to be a “multi-user” operating system, but this is very misleading. An NT server will validate an authorized user, but once the user is logged on to the NT network, all he/she can do is access files and printers. The NT user cannot just run any application on the NT server. When a user logs in to a UNIX server, he/she can then run any application if they are authorized to do so.
This takes a major load off his/her workstation. This also includes graphics-based applications since X-server software is standard issue on all UNIX operating systems. Another big difference is a disk related design. In Microsoft suite of operating systems is its antiquated use of “drive letters,” i. e. drive C:, drive D:, etc. This schema imposes hardware specific limitations on system administrators and users alike. This is highly inappropriate for client/server environments where network shares and file systems are to represent hierarchies meaningful to humans.
UNIX allows shared network filesystems to be mounted at any point in a directory structure. A network share can also span multiple disk drives (or even different machines! ) in UNIX, thus allowing administrators to maintain pre-existing directory structures that are well-known to users, yet allowing them to expand the available disk space on the server, making such system changes transparent to users. This single difference between the UNIX and Windows operating systems further underscores the original intentions of their respective designers.
