Tuesday February 07, 2006

At the Sun Analyst Summit, Marc Andreesson was up on stage (video) and put forth some statistics. What Marc's Ning team did that most do not in calculating TCO was to include the cost of real estate and power. The summary is basically that the Solaris 10 / Galaxy combination ($4,760) is literally less than 1/2 the price of the white box / Linux combination ($10,350) for 3 years. Those are Marc's numbers, not ours.

These results surprised Marc. He thought the most interesting comparison would be AMD vs Intel, but the largest cost differential was OS support. Both Solaris and Linux are free, but Solaris support is more cost effective.

Some interesting points Marc made include that Solaris zones are a big deal for them (yeah!) and that moving from Linux to Solaris is as easy as moving from Solaris to Linux.