More Microsoft FUD

I have not been the biggest fan of Red Hat but I will say the RHN and RHEL 4 are big steps forward for Red Hat. As a long-time Debian user I’ve never felt the need to use RHEL. I was recently introduced to RHEL 4 and more importantly RHN while working with the Mozilla Foundation on the build out of their infrastructure and I really like it.

So when I see a brand new comparison of Red Hat and Windows 2003 and I hear that Windows won handily, I sort of perk up. Then I read the “study” and find that they were comparing Windows 2003 with Red Hat AS 2.1 and Red Hat 8.0. Huh?! Did somebody not tell the guys at Veritest that those versions of Red Hat are up to 4 years old? Not only are they only running the 2.4 Linux kernel, they are running the version without the back-ported features from 2.6 such as the nptl threading and different I/O schedulers. Of course Red Hat is going to be slower. That would be like me comparing RHEL 4 with Windows NT or Windows 2000. I can bet who would come out on top there too.

Much like TCO studies, find out who pays for the benchmark “study” and you’ll find knows the outcome before it even hits the streets.