New startup

[suklee]

It wasn't my intention to start a 'holy war' - and so far I think the discussion has been very enlightening (and cordial). I simply wanted to tap your brains for your valuable input and experience, especially the heavy hitters.

So anyway, I was talking to one of the guys last week, who reiterated the preference towards a MS-centric platform... and the reason "mainly because of speed" was casually mentioned. (?!) Even though I have no experience with MS stuff, I know for a fact that MS does & could not possibly win on speed alone, but I want to see the research and how he (they) arrived at that conclusion...

sourceninja: you mentioned in an earlier post that you saved $50k a year by going with opensource (over what?). I'm curious how you arrived at this conclusion - could you possibly share any details?

 

[hooflung]

Server 2008 could possibly win on speed for a lot of things. As a webserver platform it can hold it's own versus Apache especially if you run an install without the GUI ( as is possible with this version ). It certainly has good support in the iSCSI department and R2 will handle SMP much, much better than previous versions of Windows Server.

I certainly don't think Server 2008 would run substancially slower than a common install of CentOS. Can you get faster with a Debian or Ubuntu Server base install with just what you need enabled? Sure, but you'll probably want to use Lighttpd or Nginx and run an application server behind it ( or run PHP/Python/Mono in FastCGI ). Then you have to think about what your load will be, who your clients are, etc etc.

As for saving money? If you went with a complete Microsoft shop you'd be paying through the nose. Each license of 2008 can be pricey. Then you have SQL Server 2005/08 that will cost in the thousands. If you have native desktop applications and only expose a few resources to the web then you could be talking a more costly site license for SQL Server. If you have homogenized your environment you might as well be running Visual Studio. And let us not forget service support for this stuff and potential hires who now will demand higher salaries.

Microsoft makes tools very easy and lately you cannot really say much bad about them. They have a solid product across the board. However, it comes with a price tag that will affect the first years of your business. Going opensource has its drawbacks too and could also potentially lead to expenditures if no one is a master at running Unix servers or analyzing what might have gone wrong with a daemon you are using. Support contracts might be equally costly. And people might just be mad you went all one way or another. However, a mix of the two is not a far stretch of what probably should happen.

There is just no reason to abandon Microsoft completely, yet there is no reason you should embrace it completely either.