Skip Navigation Links
Unix, Linux Uptime and Reliability Increase: Patch Management Woes Plague Windows
from IBM

View This Now

Research Report

Description:
Unix, the leading Linux distributions from Novell and Red Hat as well as open source Ubuntu were the clear winners in the Yankee Group 2007-2008 Global Server Operating System Reliability Survey. Yankee Group’s second annual Global Server Operating System Reliability Survey polled 400 users from 27 countries worldwide. During the past 2 years, Yankee Group polls have indicated that all of the major server operating system platforms achieved a much higher degree of reliability than they experienced in the prior decade. In general, none of the major server operating systems—Linux, Macintosh, Windows and Unix—are beset by the long list of bugs that plagued their predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, there is far less disparity now in both the number and severity of unplanned server outages and the actual downtime that businesses experience on their standard Linux, Windows and Unix platforms than at any time in recent memory.

IBM Research Report Sample

Windows Server 2003 showed a 25% decrease in per-server annual uptime, while Windows 2000 Server uptime declined slightly to only 5%. In the latest poll, Windows Server 2003 recorded 8.9 hours of downtime versus just more than 7 hours in the prior 12-month period. Its predecessor Windows 2000 Server fared much better. Downtime per server notched up by 5% to 9.9 hours compared to 9.3 hours per server per year in the 2006 poll. Microsoft’s Windows 2000 Server, now nearly 9 years old, recorded the most per-server yearly downtime—just less than 9.9 hours—although that is only a slight increase from the Yankee Group 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey.

A decrease in uptime for Windows or any stable and mature operating systems must be considered an anomaly. The decline in Windows Server 2003 reliability statistics are dismaying to corporations because the Microsoft server operating system is in use at 91% of the sites we surveyed, while 74% of businesses still use Windows 2000 Server, down from 87% in the 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey.

Upon deeper investigation, security was found to be the clear culprit. In the summer and fall when Yankee Group conducted its survey, Microsoft issued more than a dozen security alerts and patches. And to make matters worse, many of these were critical vulnerabilities.

View This Now

View all resources by IBM