Solid and reliable, Sun servers powered much of the Internet explosion in the 1990s. Running Solaris, a Sun-tailored variety of Unix, Sun servers have a well-deserved reputation for being rock solid for just about anything you can throw at them. The system stability and average uptime (time between reboots) is generally very high. Sun servers generally require trained system administrators, but once a server is properly configured and running, it tends to run with a minimum of necessary maintenance and upkeep. That said, Sun servers do have higher up-front costs. For example, workgroup-sized servers from Sun are generally twice the initial purchase cost as workgroup-sized servers from, say, Dell. However, the cost of long-term upkeep " especially given that Sun servers have a high level of scalability (which often means a long time between having to upgrade or replace equipment) and require fewer staff to support them " usually gives Sun servers a lower total cost of ownership.
Vendors: Sun (www.sun.com). If you want a Sun server, there's only one place to go " to Sun or one of its resellers. In recent years Sun has made a concerted push into the K-12 marketplace, and has frequently made aggressive price cuts for K-12 institutions.
Once the low-cost price leader, servers based on Microsoft Windows have taken some real heat lately from Linux and other competitors, but are still the mainstay of many small- to medium-sized organizations. Your support staff is likely to feel comfortable with the familiar graphical user interface-based tools of the Windows servers. In addition, today's Windows server operating systems are more stable and capable than past iterations. However, frequent and persistent security woes have plagued Windows operating systems and products (such as the IIS Web server) over the past several years. The almost continuous need to patch, upgrade, and repair Windows servers, as well as recover from hack attacks and intrusions, has put a dent in Windows' reputation as being the easiest kind of server to manage, administer, and maintain. Windows system administrators tend to be plentiful and less expensive than Unix administrators, although be careful " good Windows administrators are just as tough to find as good Unix staff. You can pay up front, or you can really pay later, and there's absolutely no substitute for good technical staff.
Windows servers, while rarely the performance leaders, have historically been a good value for schools. Now they find themselves challenged on price by lower-cost, higher-performance Linux servers, and on ease of use and administration by Apple's XServe line. The biggest hidden danger with Windows-based servers is inadvertently getting locked into the many Windows-only, proprietary technologies and products that are easy to start using but difficult or impossible to change down the line when needed. The bottom line is that Windows servers are generally not the cheapest option currently, nor the easiest to use and maintain, nor the highest-performance, but they may still hit the "sweet spot" for many schools, depending on their needs.
Vendors: Dell (www.dell.com/us/en/k12), Hewlett-Packard (gem.compaq.com/gemstore), Gateway (www.gateway.com/work/products/ed_srv_catalog.shtml), and many others.
Linux
There's been a lot of press about the Linux Operating System in recent months, and for good reason. Linux, a Unix-based operating system, is arguably the most visible and successful of the open source software projects, developed by no one company, but rather by an army of mostly volunteer programmers who tend to be motivated more by pride in their work than financial compensation. This model is a genuinely new paradigm in software development. In the past, the key weakness of Linux had been that you had to be a serious Linux geek to install and maintain it " support was on a strictly self-serve basis. That all began to change when dedicated Linux distribution and support companies like Red Hat were formed, and well-established companies like IBM, noting which way the wind was blowing (and the potential to make a lot of money in support offerings), began to make Linux a cornerstone of their strategy.
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