ports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB. In addition, Linux does not support many of the modern operating system features that Windows NT 4.0 has pioneered such as asynchronous I/O, completion ports, and finegrained kernel locks (Berinato, 1999)These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors. The Linux community continues to promise major SMP and performance improvements. They have been promising these since the development of the 2.0 Kernel in 1996. Delivering a scalable system is a complex task and it's not clear that the Linux community can solve these issues easily or quickly. As D. H. Brown Associates noted in a recent technical report, 2 the Linux 2.2 Kernel remains in the Windows 5early stages of providing a tuned SMP kernel. Myth: Linux is more reliable than Windows NT Reality: Linux needs real world proof points rather than anecdotal stories The Linux community likes to talk about Linux as a stable and reliable operating system, yet there are no real world data or metrics and very limited customer evidence to back up these claims. Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, Nasdaq and many others run missioncritical applications on Windows NT 4.0. Linux lacks a commercial quality Journeying File System. This means that in the event of a system failure (such as a power outage) data loss or corruption is possible. In any event, the system must check the integrity of the file system during system restart, a process that will likely consume an extended amount of time, especially on large volumes and may require manual intervention to reconstruct the file system (Carmella, 1997)There are no commercially proven clustering technologies to provide High Availability ...
