TCO study has lessons for Unix, Linux

IN EARLY DECEMBER 2003 we reported on a Techwise Research study into the total cost of ownership (TCO) of various configurations of clusters. Unlike many other reports about TCO, this report took into account the cost of downtime and examined the major reasons for that lost time.

The earlier report to which we referred was somewhat dated but just a few weeks ago Techwise Research updated their report after interviews with 94 US companies who used either HP’s OpenVMS on Alphaservers, IBM’s AIX on p-series machines or Sun’s Solaris on Sun Fire clusters. Their study looked at clusters of machines with up to 16 processors and that had been in production use for more than 6 months and the representation by manufacturers was almost equal.