Computer World has a really interesting article about Weather.com switching from their IBM infrastructure to open source (specifically Apache and Tomcat). So why would I post a link to that from my blog?
Well - when I see articles like this (especially when the initial lead comes from the open source news network) I usually expect to read a Microsoft-bash, but this one was a little bit different (it was an IBM-bash).
It would have been interesting to see what a comparable Microsoft solution would have looked like in terms of total costs (licenses, development and support). I know from experience that a bunch (8) of Windows 2000 boxes running on three year old hardware could probably process twelve million hits in about four hours without any caching.
If you applied caching (and I suspect that Weather.com is highly cachable) you could probably grow that figure four to five times (possibly more depending on how evenly the cache hits were spread).
The licenses for Windows Server 2003 Web Edition for the US market kick in at just under $500.00 dollars and you could pick up a dual-proc 1 RU blade for between $2,000–3,000.
So if you bought say twelve of them you are probably looking at about $40,000–$50,000 for all the software and hardware you would need to handle the load, on the front end with a bit of room to spare.
Man – I’d love to get into a lab and prove it!