For the third year in a row, IBM AIX Unix operating system (OS) running on the company’s Power System servers scored the highest reliability ratings among 19 different server OS platforms – including other Unix variants, Microsoft’s Windows Server, Linux distributions and Apple’s Mac OS X.
Over three-quarters or 78 percent of survey respondents indicated they experienced less than one of the most common, minor Tier 1 incidents per server, per annum on IBM’s AIX v. 5.3 and AIX v 7.1 distributions
Those are the results of the ITIC 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and OS Reliability Survey. ITIC partnered with GFI Software (formerly Sunbelt Software) to conduct this independent Web-based survey. It polled C-level executives and IT managers at 468 corporations from 23 countries worldwide from November through January.
The survey data indicated that the reliability and uptime of all the major server OS and server hardware distributions has improved significantly over the past several years.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 served up the biggest surprise in the survey, scoring impressive reliability gains and making it one of the top three most reliable, mainstream server OSes. Windows Server 2008 R2’s reliability renaissance is especially impressive since Microsoft’s Windows Server OS noticeably lagged behind the majority of the UNIX, Linux and Open Source distributions in the ITIC/Sunbelt 2008 and 2009 Server Reliability surveys. This was particularly evident when it came to chronicling the most severe Tier 3 outages which typically last for four or more hours, involve data loss and require multiple members of the IT department to perform remediation.
An overwhelming 92% majority of Windows Server 2008 R2 users experienced less than one or one Tier 3 outage per server, per annum followed closely by the 90% of respondents using IBM’s AIX 7.1 who said they experienced one or less than one severe Tier 3 incident, per server per annum. Some 86% of Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and 84% of HP UX 11i v3 users also testified to the reliability of those platforms, reporting that they experienced either one or less than one unplanned Tier 3 outage per server, annually.
The survey found that all server OSes continue to make year-over-year reliability gains. The essay comments and first person customer interviews revealed that the majority of the moderate and severe Tier 2 and Tier 3 outages were attributable to integration and interoperability issues such as incompatible drivers, trouble applying patches, (particularly in highly customized environments), misconfigurations and the lack of a specific component or software fix for a particular platform.
Some IT managers also acknowledged that complexity and the IT department’s unfamiliarity with new products, software versions and new technologies like virtualization and private clouds prolonged downtime. This is particularly true in instances where corporations lacked the time or the funds to certify and re-train the appropriate members of the IT staff on new technologies.
The Sun Solaris 10 now owned by Oracle had respectable reliability statistics, though the Solaris on SPARC systems lagged behind most other OS distributions. Nearly 73 percent of respondents reported that Sun Solaris 10 recorded less than one Tier 1 per server, per annum outage, while only 63 percent of Sun Solaris 10 SPARC users achieved those same reliability results. The numbers were similar for the more moderately serious Tier 2 outages with 70 percent of users running Sun Solaris 10 on SPARC systems reporting less than one incident per server, per year. Sun Solaris 10 on x86 systems fared slightly better with 71 percent recording less than one Tier 2 incident per server on an annual basis. With respect to the most severe Tier 3 outages, 70 percent of Sun Solaris 10 on SPARC survey participants say they experienced less than one incident on each server during the year, compared with 74 percent of Sun Solaris 10 running on x86 platforms who reported less than one severe Tier 3 incident per server, per annum.
Overall, with respect to the most severe and prolonged unplanned Tier 3 outages, Sun Solaris 10 also lagged behind all of the major OS distributions with 70 percent of customers reporting less than one outage. That is the approximately the same percentage of organizations that are still using the eight year-old Windows Server 2003 server operating system. Some 69 percent of Windows Server 2003 users reported less than one per server, per annum Tier 3 outage.
IBM Tops in Server Hardware Reliability
IBM hardware was also best in class in terms of reliability, stability and performance. IBM’s System z mainframes recorded the least amount of downtime; 76% indicated System z machines experienced just one-to-five minutes of unplanned outages per server, per year, the equivalent of 99.999% or better availability.
Stratus Technologies’ ftServer 6300 and 4500 series and Fujitsu’s Primequest and Primergy Servers also made impressive showings. Some 75% percent of Stratus ftServer 6300 and 4500 users say they experienced one-to-five minutes of per server, per annum downtime, for five nines of availability. Some 74% of HP’s Integrity and Fujitsu Primequest and Primergy server said they experienced less five minutes or less of unplanned annual server downtime.
Among the other survey highlights:
• A 57% majority of respondents said their server hardware is between one and three years old. One-in-five corporations – 20% – said their servers were three-to-four years old.
• One-quarter – 25% — of businesses refresh their main line of business server hardware “as needed” and 10% said they upgrade a portion of their servers annually.
• Only a very small 2% minority of organizations aggressively upgrade their servers every two years. The majority of companies are on a three, four or five year server refresh cycle with 15% of participants stating they upgrade servers every two years; 15% upgrade every three years and 17% are on a protracted five or six year server upgrade cycle. Another 15% said they have “no specific” server upgrade timetable.
• A higher percentage of users prefer to apply patches manually rather than automatically. Nearly three out-of-10 organizations – 30 percent say they opt to apply patches manually, all or most of the time. Another 35 percent of survey participants say they “sometimes” apply patches manually. Only 16 percent of respondents never apply patches manually.
• Some 26 percent of respondents who always use group policy to apply patches and 16 percent who sometimes utilize group policy methods compared to 52 percent of survey respondents who eschew group policy.
• The manual patch method does take longer than applying patches automatically or using group policies. Overall 61 percent of those polled said they spend more than one hour applying patches to their server platforms for each specific upgrade . Of that figure, just under half – 29 percent – revealed that it takes them in excess of four hours to apply patches for each incident.

The length and severity of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 unplanned outages and the patching actions related to each correspond to specific line item capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) costs for the business. Reliability, measured by downtime, can positively or negatively impact TCO and accelerate or delay the time it takes to realize ROI.
Improvements or declines in reliability also mitigate or increase technical and business risks to the organization’s end users and its external customers. The ability to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) hinges on server reliability, uptime and manageability. These are key indicators that enable organizations to determine which server operating system platform or combination thereof is most suitable.
Overall, these survey responses provide crucial, comparative reliability metrics to enable customers to make informed choices on which server hardware and server operating system or combination thereof, best suits their specific business and budgets needs.
Conclusions and Recommendations
In summary the ITIC 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey findings indicates that all of the server operating system platforms have achieved a high degree of reliability. However, the IBM AIX 7.1 operating system, followed closely by Windows Server 2008 R2, HP UX 11i v3 and Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 are the top four most reliable server OS distributions.

The sharp increase in remote and mobile workers is spurring the fast adoption of iPads in the workplace. At the same time, public cloud computing deployments among mainstream users remain slow and steady. These are some of the other survey highlights of the latest ITIC/Sunbelt Software survey on Desktop and Infrastructure deployment trends.

No Rush to the Cloud — Yet

Users on the Move: Number of Mobile workers increases
The survey results also confirm what has been widely reported: that greater numbers and percentages of users are spending more time telecommuting, traveling and generally working outside the corporate offices.
Over half – 58 percent of businesses say that up to 25 percent of their employees work remotely; another 18 percent of respondents said that between 26 to 50 percent of their workers are remote; 11 percent said that 51 to 75 percent work outside the office and seven percent of respondents said that 76 to 100 percent of their employees work remotely. It is significant that only 7 percent of the over 400 businesses polled say that none of their workers are remote or mobile.
Apparently, IT departments are getting used to support mobile workers: just over half 52 percent of survey respondents indicated they find it just as easy to support remote employees as their local workers; however 43 percent say they find it more difficult, while the remaining seven percent are unsure.

To date only a 17 percent minority – less than two out of 10 businesses who responded to the Sunbelt/ITIC poll say their organizations have migrated any IT functions to the cloud. By contrast, 62 percent of those surveyed say their firm have not migrated any IT functions to a cloud environment; another 19 percent of companies are studying the issue but have not yet decided and the remaining two percent are “Unsure” of their firm’s cloud deployment plans.
“No compelling business reason,” was the most oft-cited reason for holding off on a cloud deployment and that was chosen by 66 percent of the respondents. Another 49 percent of survey participants indicated their organizations’ concerns about security and the need for specific guarantees to safeguard their for sensitive data is deterring cloud deployments.
Only a small five percent minority felt that a cloud deployment would be disruptive to their current network environment.
Anti-Virus software is current
The survey respondents were certain that their anti-virus software is doing the job. In a clear indication that organizations recognize the need to keep their AV packages updated, nearly eight-out-of-10 businesses – 79 percent affirmed that their AV software is current, while 17 percent indicate that the majority of their AV packages are up-to-date. Overall, less than five percent of those polled say their AV software is outdated.
Similarly, an overwhelming 77 percent of respondents reported that they’re satisfied with the ability of their firms current security packages to alert them to the presence of viruses, worms, Trojans and other malware threats. Only 16 percent of respondents expressed concern regarding the ability of their AV software to alert them to potential security breaches, while the remaining seven percent were unsure.
Desktop Management
When it comes to desktop management, 41 percent of companies use three or four different software packages to oversee crucial functions such as Remote PC monitoring; Patch and update management/deployment; malware protection; asset inventory; critical alerting; remote assistance/remote control; IT asset management reporting. Another 16 percent deploy a singular management package while 20 percent say their firms use two management packages and 12 percent were “unsure.” The remaining 12 percent indicated they do not use any management software to manage their desktops.
The chief challenges and deterrents to installing and deploying desktop management packages are: integration and interoperability which was cited by 57 percent of survey respondents and the large upfront investment costs which 47 percent say make upper management unlikely to approve the project. Nearly one-third of survey respondents cited the difficulty of quantifying TCO and ROI and the need for too much training and orientation as the biggest challenge to deploying desktop management solutions, while 28 percent say they have difficulty comparing the functionality of the various products.
Among the other Survey Highlights:
• Over half the survey respondents – 56 percent – use a dedicated management tool to deploy their software updates, but a surprising 42 percent still manually install their software updates.
• Nearly seven out of 10 businesses – 68 percent – say they’re satisfied with their organization’s current ability to ensure that the corporate PCs have the latest security updates & patches compared with 26 percent who replied negatively to that question.
• Just over half – 55 percent – of those polled indicated they were satisfied with their firm’s ability to inventory the hardware assets (total number, make, model and specifications) in your environment; while 34 percent said “No” and 11 percent were “Unsure.” The ability to inventory hardware assets is one of the crucial components necessary to enable companies to ascertain TCO and ROI.

Thanks to everyone who responded to the independent, joint ITIC/Sunbelt Software survey on Windows 7, Desktop Infrastructure and Cloud Services deployment trends and issues. Please NOTE: no vendors sponsored this survey or in any way influenced the results.
Over 400 of you from 22 countries took time out of your busy schedules to respond to our poll.

Windows 7 is a winner!

As we noted in our previous blog, Windows 7 officially celebrates its 1st birthday, today — October 22nd. And there are plenty of reasons to celebrate. Yes, Windows 7 has sold over 240 million copies, to date making it the fastest selling OS in Microsoft’s (or any vendor’s) history. And yes, many of those sales can be attributed to pent-up demand because the overwhelming majority of the Windows installed base elected to remain on Windows XP and skip Vista. Admittedly, many organizations would opt to remain on Windows XP indefinitely if Microsoft was not ending support for the nearly 10 year old desktop OS. Those disclaimers aside, Windows 7′s success is no fluke.

A three-quarters majority – 73 percent of the 400+ respondents to the latest joint Sunbelt Software/ITIC poll, gave Windows 7 an “excellent,” “very good” or “good” rating.
That’s very close to the 80 percent majority of beta and early adopters who gave the Windows 7 the same high marks in the 2009 survey. The latest responses, coming after corporations have used Windows 7 in production for a full year, provides the best evidence that the Microsoft operating system is living up to the hype and fulfilling business’ needs. Only a small three percent minority of survey respondents gave Windows 7 a “Poor” and/or “Unsatisfactory” rating.
And a 72 percent majority of survey participants say they have already deployed, are in the process of deploying or will shortly deploy Windows 7. Only 7 percent of those polled indicated that they are “unlikely” to deploy Windows 7 at all and none of the respondents said they plan on switching to a rival operation system.
Lack of funds was the chief reason cited by the remaining 21 percent of respondents who said they have no definitive plans to upgrade to Windows 7 over the next 12 months. Anecdotal user comments confirmed that many companies are still in the grip of a recession and will wait until they upgrade their desktop hardware to migrate to Windows 7.
Windows XP is still the most widely deployed desktop OS – with 90 percent of the respondents indicating it was present in their shops. But Windows 7 is catching up quickly: 83 percent of those polled say they’ve deployed Windows 7 compared to only 37 percent who have Windows Vista.
Interestingly, the Apple Mac is the most popular non-Windows operating system as mainstream enterprises continue to adopt it. According to our poll, Apple Macs are present in 28 percent of your networks – which is three times more than the two most popular Linux and open source operating system distributions. Nine percent of survey respondents indicated they use Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu – the latter of which has made steady gains in the last two years.
Among large enterprises, IBM’s AIX was clearly the most popular UNIX distribution, besting both HP UX and Sun Solaris (now owned by Oracle) by a 2 to 1 margin.
Nearly two-thirds or 60% of you indicated you will deploy Windows 7; 30% of you say you’ll migrate to the new Microsoft desktop operating system within the first six months while another 30% say intend to make the transition sometime within the year. Four out of 10 businesses – 40% — have no definitive migration timetable.