As per my delving into the reality of today's server OS, and without giving away specific results, here is a fun exercise for the reader: of these eleven features, what ranking do you think the real-life IT professionals who took part on our online survey applied to them?

security hardening
performance
scalability
virtualisation
high reliability/failover
systems management
interoperability
account management framework
drive encryption
identity management and aggregation
legacy compatibility

Some of these, I have to admit, I wouldn't even see as necessarily part of an ideal (Platonic) good server OS anyway... Where do applications and network features start and end in some of this?

More anon.