The other big 3-letter-company

I found this text today, and even it´s not about Sun (not even a Sun product), it is nevertheless very interesting, because it paints an picture of our competition and put the wonderful picture IBM presents in it´s tv-commercials into perspective:

The need for manual repairs for frequent Linux server crashes "translated into wasted time and money and, in some cases, downtime for important applications," said Arty Ecock, manager of VM enterprise systems for CUNY Computing and Information Systems (CIS).

and

CUNY chose Red Hat Linux running on a single chassis of IBM blade servers to support these applications. Unfortunately, the servers had "laptop-quality IDE drives installed on each blade," said Ecock. "They would fail frequently." To fix each failure, CUNY's IT folks had to replace hard drives and provision the blades manually.

and

Servers didn't fail just once, either. "The hard drives in our blades were frequently burning out," Ecock said.

Unfortunatly they did not use the most obvious solution: Solaris 10 x86 with Jumpstart Enterprise Tookit. Deploying webservers with this solution is a piece of cake. Instead they use a rather mysterious netboot-solution.
Finally this points to one of weak points of linux: Whatever analysts or linux companies will tell you, nearly every commercial grade unix will make you more productive by better stability and better managebility . Commercial unixes had to crack some hart nuts in the past, nuts that still in front of the linux community. Kickstart or Autoyast are only the beginning, not the ultimate solution.
(PS: And no, the harddisks in Galaxy and T2000 are not laptop-grade disks, they are server-class SAS-disks.)