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July 20, 1998

The Hidden Cost Of NT

Windows NT systems carry lower sticker prices than their Unix counterparts, but ongoing maintenance and support requirements can make them much more costly to run

By Martin J. Garvey

indows NT Server is hot. It's on every IT manager's shopping list. NT systems are affordable--they cost about half of what comparably configured Unix systems do, by some estimates. Loads of packaged applications are now available for the operating system, from enterprise resource planning to sales-force automation tools.

NT Server's success rides in part on the oft-quoted belief that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Windows NT Server is now part of the corporate infrastructure.

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But according to some IT veterans, NT Server doesn't belong there yet. NT lacks the robustness, reliability, and scalability found in more-mature Unix, AS/400, and host systems, they say. Customers who sign up for NT Server need to be aware of ongoing maintenance costs and support requirements--issues that can greatly increase the cost of running NT. Many users adopt NT Server because of the price of the software license and server hardware (see chart, left). But these fees represent only a slice of the total cost of NT over the platform's life cycle. NT Server users say this relatively new platform requires more ongoing attention than other server operating systems.

The support costs and staffing required for the care and feeding of NT are causing some adopters to abandon NT Server as a strategic application platform--often relegating it to the task of file-and-print serving.

Oriental Trading Co., a $200 million direct marketer, plans to move its Internet server off NT Server after suffering excessive downtime and high maintenance demands. "Once a week it goes down--anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours before we figure out what's wrong," says Bob Cargill, Oriental's systems manager. "That's not what we want in a Web server. When customers aren't able to get through and place their orders, that's a ticket to low customer satisfaction."

While there are ways around these reliability and support problems, customers such as Oriental Trading feel safer with an alternate platform. Cargill and his team are implementing IBM's AS/400 multiprocessing RISC server. NT Server is used only to let customers view its catalog over the Web--not for order processing. Oriental doesn't plan to upgrade to the next NT version.

Manage Expectations
Few claim that NT Server can do the job of mainframes and high-end Unix systems. However, NT servers are supporting growing numbers of business users and running crucial applications for Web commerce, enterprise resource planning, and E-mail. NT has also made inroads into industries such as banking and health care. It's imperative that Microsoft and its third-party partners make NT as battle-hardened as soon as possible.

Many first-time users are often surprised to learn that most NT servers are capable of running only a single application per machine--be it mail, ERP software, or a custom application. If companies need to scale beyond the 1,500 or so users that Microsoft says the server will support, they must buy an additional piece of hardware and software. Another alternative is to opt for Windows NT Enterprise Edition, which supports eight-processor servers and includes the SQL Server database, clustering, and transaction support. The performance boost that comes with NT Enterprise Edition comes at a price--up to nearly $4,000 more than the standard edition.

But if you opt for standard NT, running one application per server, you could encounter a proliferation of hardware that must be managed. That's the complete opposite of the trend in the Unix environment, where IT departments are consolidating multiple applications and users on high-end servers. This centralization of computing resources greatly simplifies maintenance and software upgrades and can reduce support staff requirements.

Still, many companies that have no prior experience with Unix or host systems see NT as a perfect platform for getting started. Net-Temps Inc., a two-year-old online recruitment firm, works with 1,000 staffing firms looking for IT talent. Last year, it needed to upgrade its server. Since the company wasn't saddled with legacy systems, NT seemed like the best option. "We looked for a better, bigger box," says Kevin Strange, Net-Temps' technology VP. "I couldn't justify a $30,000 Solaris server when a Dell NT server was $5,000. That's where I made my mistake."