21 Sep Why we think Linux is the Best Choice for Mission Critical Servers

Why we think Linux is the Best Choice for Mission Critical Servers

We’ve just this week retired one of the servers from our office infrastructure. Having had great success using virtualisation in our customer hosting platform, we are now busy virtualising several office servers onto a similar VMWare environment. Before shutting down our trusty old mail relay server, we checked how long it’s been running:

[root@mail-relay postfix]# uptime
12:10:22 up 1510 days, 20:20,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

That’s 4 years and 50 days without a reboot! This says something for the stability of the Redhat Linux operating system and also the build quality of the HP Proliant servers we use.

We do also use some Windows servers, but I’m sure none of them have been up this long without requiring a reboot for some reason or other. Windows is fine as a front-end environment, either with local PC’s or in a terminal server (thin client) configuration, but it’s more than clear to us that Linux is the way to go for performance, stability and high reliability over the long term. All our systems use Linux (either RedHat or Centos) for database, mid tier and web server functions.

If anyone has a windows server that can beat our Linux uptime record, then please let me know!

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