The annual server reliability survey report shows that all the major operating systems are pretty reliable, and have gotten better over the last three to five years.

On average Windows, Linux, and Unix servers experienced three to five failures per server per year in 2005, generating 10 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server.

Yankee says that Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux as the downtime was longer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors.

It says that one reason for this was that there was a shortage of Linux and open source documentation.

However, the report said that both operating systems were unreliable in comparison to Unix-based operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10. µ

L'INQ
Damn Yankees