Folks.
Your not giving us much to go on ?
Basic questions ....
What hardware are you running (or thinking of buying)?
What size database do you envisage??
What transactional rate do you expect.
Is Critical, really critical or just a perception???
Is it a 24-7-365 system or just standardbusinesshours
Are your development staff,(DBA,system gurus) Unix school or wintel experts. ???
Can you source Unix people cheaper than Wintel people ... visa-versa
Are you looking at an isolated box or do you expect to have peer replication online with hot or warm spare machines ???
Is it an ISV model application or ASP (data out hosting)???
Does your budget have a ceiling ???
How secure does data access need to be ...???
Initial thoughts...
Wintel or linux,unix are both good platforms.
Yes, linux uses less resources & is arguably more stable; however, Wintel debugging is IMHO easier...
Wintel will require more hardware resources to get similar performance.
With Wintel you can use all the really great commercial COM+/active X objects available to do all those common tasks
(Email, FTP, PDF, SS, LDAP etc) where you do not want to reinvent the wheel & want commercail grade performance & easy development ...
Stay away from .net server, for at least two year after release ...
If your staff are Linux,unix people, your development costs for that platform are lower & you leverage their already existing knowledge ..visa versa...
Ultimately, Its always a trade off, budget, time to market, speed & performance, user satisfaction, security & backup coverage, staff skill level, consultants (too many , too few), all these factors & more will affect the final outcome...
Justin ....
