<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by winkydink:
Somewhat, but not enough to keep modern thinking CIO's from adopting Linux in production at a very fast rate.
Oracle (can't remember if they're in the Fortune 500 or not 
) claims to be 100% Linux. I know for a fact that they use Linux exclusively for their ASP offering which counts financial institutions among its clients. Obviously, they think it's ready for prime time and are betting heavily on it.
In a former life I was responsible for one of the top 5 Sun shops in California. I can assure you that their support was nothing to write home about (and I had direct phone numbers up to the SVP level).
Hardware & software suppliers will only ever contractually commit to a RESPONSE time, not a RESOLUTION time. I don't care if you're talking IBM or Honest Bob's Dog Poop Linux Distribution.
You will find many examples of Fortune 500 companies using Linux in production in the article I listed above. Check Information Week's website as well for more.
For tasks requiring 4 or fewer processors, you can't Linux on price/performance. Many Linux admins boast uptimes > 1 year on their boxes.</font>
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Linux is far from an end-all solution to all things. Like many things, it has it's place, and the trick is to know when to deploy it, but with the proper expectations.
Although I'm getting further and further away from the hands-on side of the business, it strikes me that uptime of a particular box is nothing to write home about--in fact, uptime of a year suggests to me that the admin has been rather lax about security and performance patch application (although clearly this depends upon the environment in which the box sits).
One of the nice things about Linux (and why the stuff I've run on it in the past never had silly "uptime wars") is that I can afford to get me a nice cluster of n + 1/2/x machines, such that I can pull them offline to patch without disrupting the app and service that is being provided.
The short version: if the box has an uptime of a year, and has been rooted for 300 days, is the uptime really that impressive
?
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Saving the world, one clue at a time.