In the server OS wars, Linux has been consistently gaining on market leader Windows and stalwart Unix. Thanks to powerful commodity x86 boxes, many organizations that have traditionally run enterprise applications such as SAP or Oracle on more expensive RISC-based boxes now have the option of moving to x86 servers. For such organizations, it would seem logical to conclude that hardware price is the No. 1 reason for moving from Unix to either Windows or especially Linux.

The hardware price differential may have been significant four years ago, but it’s not the main reason that organizations are looking to x86-based systems to run their enterprise apps. So says Richard Jones, vice president and service director for the Data Center Strategies at Burton Group an IT advisory firm. The x86 64-bit systems have matured to the point where organizations have gained some institutional knowledge to effectively administer them, Jones asserts. Plus, IT pros like the fact that x86-based systems are standardized; if you are running Dell and you don’t like the support, it’s relatively easy to switch to IBM, for example. There are options to switch vendors that don’t require much if anything in the way of retraining, Jones said.

What about costs? Well Jones gives Unix vendors some credit; they have lowered prices to the point where the differential between a Unix box and an x86 box isn’t five to 10 times more as was the case three to four years ago. Compare some Sun Sparc hardware with x86 hardware with similar processing, and the price isn’t that much more to sway many organizations away from Unix, Jones said.

A quick visit to the Sun Microsystems makes comparison shopping easy. Take a high-end Sun Fire X4450 Server with four dual-core Intel Xeon E7220 processors, 8 GB memory and plug in a few upgrade options for 292 GB 10000 rps SAS storage. Price tag: $14,252. Then price the low-end Sun Sparc Enterprise 5520 with the UltraSparc T2 processor and 4 core 32 threads, 4 GB of memory and 292 GB 1000 rpm SAS storage. Price tag: $14,995.

Of course software is another story, and Jones said there are still dramatic differences in OS costs between the traditional Unix and x86 systems — except for Solaris 10. Maintenance costs are also still divergent, again except for Solaris 10. Jones went on to say that the cost of applications tend to be all over the map: Some applications are much more expensive initial cost and ongoing maintenance when running on traditional Unix compared to x86 systems while others are comparable.

So for some organizations, the bottom line isn’t really about the bottom line after all, at least according to Jones. It’s his contention that most organizations are moving away from Unix because they want the flexibility and have the internal know-how to handle the switch. The cost differential just isn’t big enough alone to sway people anymore.

Does this reflect your reality? Or have you found that the cost difference between RISC-based systems and x86 systems still wide enough to drive your mainframe through?

On a Unix based system, all files and folders belong to a group and a owner. Or rather, an owner and a group has specific permissions to read, write and execute files. So you might need to change the owner of certain files and folders so that you’ll be able to open them, edit them and write to them again.

I’ll show you how to do this via SSH. You’ll need a login and password in order to access the shell.

ssh -lroot domain.com