September 29, 2009
Unix at 40: Hanging on despite strong Linux, Windows challenges
The middle-aged OS is not expected to die any time soon, just slowly fade away
24 RecommendationsIn a twist of irony, the Unix platform celebrates its 40th birthday this year, as does the man whose work probably has done more to diminish the trendiness of Unix than anyone else: Linux founder Linus Torvalds.
Linux and Windows Server outsell Unix by volume. Indeed, given all the attention Windows and the open source Linux platform get, the battle for the mainstream server market can sometimes appear to be a duel between just these two platforms. Unix often seems like yesterday's -- or even last decade's -- news.
[ Unix may still have a future after 40 years, but the prognosis may not be so good for Solaris. See InfoWorld's report "Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?" | Get the scoop on the new Windows Server 2008 R2 in the InfoWorld Test Center review. ]
But hold off on any Unix memorial service just yet.
Unix remains a vital cog in enterprise IT and can be expected to remain so for years to come. Figures such as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison attest to its maturity. In a recent public appearance, Ellison endorsed both Linux and the Solaris Unix OS that Oracle wants to acquire as part of its planned $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems: "We are a supporter of Linux but Solaris is the more mature OS."
A Hewlett-Packard official chimes in that Unix would have a long life similar to how mainframes have continued to thrive. "I haven't seen mainframes [go] away and people were predicting their demise, what, 10, 20 years ago," says Brian Cox, director of software planning and marketing in the HP business-critical systems group. One reason: Unix offers deep integration and higher quality of service, says Satya Sharma, CTO for IBM's AIX-based Power systems.
Unix: A stable but consolidating market
A sampling of Gartner server shipment numbers does show Unix trailing Linux and Windows Server, as the chart below shows. (If the chart is not visible, you can see it in the original story at InfoWorld.com.)
Unix shipments went from 670,458 units shipped in 2006 to 437,414 units in 2009, with a slight uptick to 451,593 units anticipated in 2012. Linux server shipments for those same years read like this: 1,911,906 units in 2006, 1,682,633 units in 2009, and 1,980,532 units in 2012. Windows Server shipments total 5,416,453 units in 2006, 4,947,891 units in 2009, and 5,699,810 units in 2012. (The marketplace as a whole suffered from the current recession, thus the down numbers for all platforms.) For 2014, Gartner projects Linux shipments of 2,174,334 units, Windows shipments of 6,313,292, and Unix shipments of 474,993.
A user of all three platforms vouches for the maturity of Unix. "It's really at the core of every one of our enterprise systems," says Paul Sikora, vice president of IT transformation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which runs Unix for its Oracle and cache databases. Unix offers mature redundancy and clustering capabilities, and software vendors are comfortable with their software running on Oracle and Unix, Sikora says.
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mboltz
29-Sep-09 9:09am
As with the mainframe, the death of UNIX has been greatly exaggerated. Good to see that some news media recognize this point. What would interest me though, is whether the numbers reflect the full breadth of UNIX variants, including Mac OS X, the open source family (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) and so on. Or whether they only looked to commercial sales of each. I think just factoring in that Apple shipped over 2 million Macs last quarter, each loaded with Mac OS X, that counts for quite a few UNIX systems, even if the end-users don't know that it's ultimately a flavor of UNIX under the hood (and one of the reasons why I use a Mac myself, as a long time UNIX fan).
RamboTribble
29-Sep-09 9:12am
1 reply
1 reply
It is a bit artificial to separate Linux from Unix. Linux is simply an evolution of Unix into a GPL-licensed variant. Linus may have written Linux from scratch, but it was an implementation of the Unix standard and he has never made any bones about that.
tomaddox
29-Sep-09 9:46am
4 replies
4 replies
Except for, you know, the completely different kernel, development philosophy, and toolset (most Unix vendors are shipping the GNU tools now, but there was a time when they definitely didn't). Will the same programs run on Linux and Unix on the same architecture without recompilation? No? Then they're not the same. Of course, most software won't run on different versions of Unix either without recompilation, so it's arguable that "Unix" is even the same operating system as itself!
On a side note, how many of the critiques from the Unix Haters Handbook have been overcome in the past fifteen years?
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
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