Technical Support Unix & costing

Firza,

     There are four parts in your question, and it cost 0 points - what a fabulous offer.  Anyhow, lets not get intimidate by the points eh.
     Basically I can break up your curiosity into four components:

1. Technical support for Unix.
A: Really depends on the what flavor of unix you are looking at.   Some are pretty hard to get support, some are quite easy to look for experts (hey we got expert exchange).  But it all depend how much you value your Unix deployment.  If you are running a multi-billion dollars enterprise-wide solution, than you will be looking at some commercially-packaged products that has support option.  Most commercial Unices have the option.  For Linux, please check with the vendor, or local reseller.

2. How much will Unix cost.
A: Pretty much like answer to #1.

3. Cost of capital
A: Depends on what you would like.  They can be as cheap as you own desktop with a single floppy (Linux do have distribution on floppy:), or as much a a few million dollars.  And back to my comment on #1, the more robust, the more reliable the system, more the component or the capital would cost you.  For example, you can have a single HD to store you data - and this will cost you no more that a few hundreds dollars.  Or you can invest in a more robust RAID-5 array, which might cost a few month salary (at least my salary).

4. Cost of maintenance.
A: hate to say "it depends", or "please look at #1 or #2, or even #3".  Unix as an OS generall have very little maintenance.  But the application hosted in the machine itself will vary.  A simple mail routing gateway for example will be easier to maintain that a web page that serve an on-line store.

I hope this could give you some hints on how to make you decision.

regards,

samri

Adjusted points to 5

samri answer like be a general but what I want is, how much cost (figure) must I spend if I use Unix for a platform in my system.

MUST spend? I reckon you could get away with $100 for a 486 PC, download FreeBSD or Linux for the cost of the phone bill, spend $30 on a book and not have a maintenance contract ($0).

I wouldn't try to run a business on it though :)