UNIX Migration Trends

According to a recent ChangeWave Research survey, IT managers are increasingly moving from proprietary RISC-based UNIX servers to lower-cost Intel-based servers. Proprietary servers can't keep pace with standard Intel-based servers' rapid increases in price/performance gains. In addition, numerous manufacturers offer Intel-based servers, providing an open and interoperable market for hardware solutions—and freeing you from being locked into one vendor's product.

This trend is helping to solidify Windows' market share at the expense of products such as Sun Microsystems' Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, and IBM's AS/400. To dig deeper into the UNIX-to-Windows migration trend, I spoke with Doug Miller, Microsoft’s “Solutions CEO” for UNIX-to-Windows migrations. Miller’s group is responsible for focusing Microsoft’s consulting and partner resources to help customers migrate from UNIX to Windows. “We have over 50 public case studies of customers that have moved from UNIX to a Windows-based infrastructure. We also have over 100 active migration projects,” Miller told me. . . .