Big iron vs. Linux

InfoWorld: “Doing a thorough ‘deep dive’ analysis of the technology at a partner company in a few hours is difficult, so it was important to look for small details that provide insight into the larger picture. At Company A, I was struck by one detail in particular: While they had made systems choices that provided stability for their environment, they had taken an expensive “big iron” approach — a few big boxes running a proprietary operating system on a proprietary architecture. Company B was moving decidedly in the other direction — migrating to clusters of inexpensive, Intel-based Linux servers to perform the same tasks as Company A.”