Windows and SQL Server : Receive so much negativity in terms of the Highly Available, Scalable Platform..

I remain neutral, but time and again, when people talk Windows or SQL Server, they seem to consider them unreliable with limits around scalability, performance and availability.

And then you start looking at some of the big boys you have listed here in the architectural section and most of them are on Linux, MySQL,Oracle platforms that we dont see Windows and SQL Server in there..

What are your thoughts ?

Comments

[Marcelo Szwarc]

I guess Windows Server and MS SQL are very scalable. The problem begins when you have to set up you own machines to run your site. The costs are going to become a problem, because you have to maintain many licenses. That's why most of the big sites run on Linux machines. I guess that's not about scalability, but a costs concern. You can see MySpace architecture, that is a Windows/MSSQL site that is very well scaled.

Nowadays, I would only run a site on a Windows Server because of its ASP.NET support. That won't be a problem in the future, because MONO Project is gaining terrain, and everyone will be able to run asp.net on linux.

There's no real advantage in running a PHP site, for example, on a Windows machine. That also contributes for your impression that a little amount of sites run Windows.

[franklin]

Licenses are a key point driving some organizations' choice to go with Linux-based solutions.
To add cache capacity to a LAMP solution, you just add more commodity hardware running memcached.

For Windows-based solutions, you need to buy additional Windows licenses to add more servers. Why incur the additional cost?
Granted, you could take a base Windows/ASP.NET site and augment its caching capability with Linux servers running memcached. However, then your operations team must have expertise with both Windows and Linux. Hiring staff with expertise in both Windows and Linux is more costly.

In terms of technology, there is nothing innate about Windows / SQL Server solutions that mean they can't scale as well as the Linux stack.