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A Case for Linux in the Corporation
_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."
Before you flame me, read this whole article. This is a fairy tale of linux winning over microsoft. Not that it couldn't (or didn't) happen, it's just that the author presents it in such a format as to make it unbelievable. Did anyone else get that same impression?
What's missing are any verifiable facts. Until any are presented this article goes in the round file -- i.e.: somebody's pipe dream of the way Linux should help.
All of the major vendors list the company name with most case studies -- it is common practice. Who is the company? Is their third party verification of the reported shift?
It could happen -- it might have happened -- it is useless to use this article to sell management on the benefits of open source -- this has few if any real details.
Please, please present some factual and verifiable accounts that can be used in making OS decisions!
I don't care if you never implement a Linux/*BSD box, or if you think Linux is the biggest piece of crap to ever be installed on a computer. The simple fact that its an alternative to NT (and one that, as this article shows, can be done piecemeal) is good for the industry. It keeps MS honest. As an IT director you have one hell of a bargining chip at your disposal. You still may go with MS tech, but at least you can do it with some leverage on the licensing terms.
...this would be a very interesting article.
As it stands, it's just annoying. How do we know how much is true, and how much is embellished (or even pure fantasy?)
I was about to pass it along to a colleague but decided not too. It's just TOO unverifiable.
I happen to be a Mac user with very little personal or professional involvement in either WIndows NT or LINUX.
One of the main reason I have heard time and time again for companies not switching to another lower TCO OS (MacOS, some open source Unix) is the cost of retraining. Here, MS, clearly made the cost of ownership HIGHER than the cost of retraining and a company noticed it. Now, after MS tries to move everyone to .NET and owning a WinTel computer requires annual fees, don't you think more companies will move away from Windows?
Burn Hollywood Burn
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to MS Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 10,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for RedHat (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux has a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
This reads *exactly* like what my life was like, late '97 to late '99. Uglier and uglier NT network (we had roughly 35 NT domains with only 2000 users), more and more fragile services (mostly mail and printing because our file serving was from NetWare), higher and higher costs (and more and more time) to get anything done.
I kept suggesting Linux (yes, back then). I even setup a non-crashing backup print server--but I was the only one who used it regularly (of course, everybody used it about twice a week....). Unfortunately three factors worked against me:
1) Linux wasn't quite as big then as it is now.
2) The network admin was nearly techno-illiterate. She could do the stuff she had been trained to in a couple of NT classes but nothing else. Linux scared her. And she wasn't the kind of person to educate herself to conquer fear--her method was to insult and ignore the source.
3) We were about 1 hour from Redmond. It's hard to shield yourself from The Presence when you are that close.
324006
First question: will it run my software? Answer: in health care buy windows.
Second question: is it cost justified? Answer: will it run my software?
Answer: buy windows. Linux is not an option for most of the systems we are considering. Articles like this one don't help it either -- real, verifiable, usable data would.
Wow, I can read that in so many ways...
First, I don't buy into the credibility of the story. I want to know hard information about this particular case study. While the generalities of the story rings basically true to my ears (probably because I want it to be true) the absense of referencable specifics make the story factually questionable.
Second, maybe it's just my lack of experience on the matter, but there were some licensing costs there that I never even heard of before. Maybe it's simply because I never bothered to notice. But "I don't buy it" also means that I don't pay for MS's licensing costs so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that Microsoft has been riding on the momentum of accepted piracy for so long and without a doubt, it was intentional. It's like a drug dealer -- get'm hooked and then charge them for it dearly later. Corporate America and hundreds of thousands of IT professionals are frightened to death about the "withdrawls" from Microsoft and like an addicted smoker, they would rather pay the costs of continued use rather than kick a bad habit and do what's best for the "body."
I'm all for MS Windows as a client, to be honest. It works good [enough] for the end user and it's damned easy. And since MS Office enjoys enough corporate ubiquity, it's still potentially damaging to use anything but MS Office where different companies do business together. HOWEVER that has no bearing on the server side which is exactly why it has historically been an easier market to enter. The geniuses behind the SaMBa project are probably the biggest heros in the story of Linux as they enabled something that simply made it all work.
So I'd like to see some follow-up like knowing more specifics such as what company this is, when it happened and such. Who from RedHat can confirm this story?
I want to believe it so badly that I almost do. More importantly, I want something I can use later without looking like a moron unable to answer the practical questions.
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to M$ Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 100,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for R3dH@t (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux had a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone had a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
I am a little interested as to who everyone is so concerned about companies adopting linux? I think I've heard all the arguments: it's good for the Linux community, it's good for the companies(and the economy), it whacks Bill in the balls . . . whatever. But in my opinion, the beauty of Linux lies in the fact that it is used largely by users who want to use it, not those who have to. And it makes no sense to me why you or I should care whether corp X uses Linux, BSD, Windows, or an old Lisp machine unless it personally affects us(through our jobs or investments).
I am not trying to sound elitist -- I am not saying that "those not enlightened enough to use Linux should not." What I am saying, is that mindshare, both in the terms of users and corporations is rather irrelevant. Besides, if you believe that Linux is perfect for everything(and I don't -- my Windows machine is a great equivalent of my Dreamcast), then those corporations who use Linux will have lower costs and a competitive edge, resulting in economic success and in the displacement of Windows using companies. If this is what's happening now with the adoption of Linux, it makes no sense for us to care about it as anything more than a vindication of the OS, and I think there are very few people at Slashdot who need convincing.
What saddens me is the decline of the hacker ethic and the change of emphasis from "Lets make it better so people use it" to "lets yell louder about how good it is so people use it." And what saddens me even more is that I am wasting time writing this and not coding . . . I guess I am being a little hypocritical. But still, I am convinced there is no reason cheer after a company's adoption of Linux and boo after hearing "Windows." The reason people cheer at football games is that they can't come down to the field and help out. Well, in the case of linux, we can.
In fact, the most important thing about the article is the observation that Linux can be adopted piecemeal while Microsoft tends to want you to change all your software, and often much of your hardware, at once. In an economic downturn, the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money for the chance to take a leap of faith and shift your paradigm. Instead, more evolutionary tactics are called for, which just happens to be what Linux or *BSD is good for.
The use of Linux doesn't promise a radical improvement in the way you do business, but it also doesn't have a lot of the risk associated with a paradigm shift. Companies hedging their bets would do well to at least consider not buying Microsoft.
Hi!
Like others, I'm a bit disturbed by the anonymous "case study" that was presented in this article. I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing who the company is, and some third-party verification that such a change actually took place.
But there's no denying the central argument: Microsoft's licensing fees have dramatically jumped in price, and the terms of their licensing agreements have gotten substantially worse. Yesterday, for instance, I received an email from Microsoft regarding SQL Server licensing. In short, I have till October 1 to upgrade all of my SQL Server 7 licenses to SQL Server 2000--or I lose the right to to "upgrade" price for SQL Server 2000. If I choose to upgrade after October 1 I will have to pay the full retail price.
I'm a big believer in the concept of "don't fix what isn't broken." While the move from SQL Server 7.0 to SQL Server 2000 isn't a big deal (at least for our SS7 applications) I see little reason to spend bucks upgrading server databases that don't need to be changed. But if I need to migrate those down the road, I'll have to pay substantially higher fees--the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later demand from Microsoft just infuriates me.
But the licensing problem gets worse. Microsoft has dramatically raised their prices and dramatically restricted their terms. Case in point: we're starting to develop a project for a small startup non-profit organization. This is a group that does physical therapy on horseback for handicapped kids--they used to be part of Easter Seals, but Easter Seals has dropped them. (Long, sad story.) They're on their own, and they need to get organized. We want to help them (we're working pro bono publico) and we're recommending a "virtual office" concept. Don't build/buy/rent an office building: instead, let volunteers and paid staff function from home. Manage the office functions in a web application, handle the phones with call forwarding and related telephony stuff, and so forth--it's the 21st century, and there's lots of cool things we can do to hold costs down so program funds can be focused on kids and horses.
Sounds great, right? Except--we run right smack into Microsoft licensing. We're a Microsoft shop--and part of the benefit of doing pro bono projects like this is the hands-on experience we get with new development tools. This would be the perfect project for Microsoft's dot-Net technologies. That is, until we go live--and have to pay $2500 per processor for the server license for the OS, and another $2500 per processor for the SQL Server 2000 license. I'm entirely willing to develop the site for Equi-Librium pro bono--I am also willing to pay Microsoft a reasonable fee for the software we'll use. But five thousand U.S. currency one-dollar simolians is most definitely not a reasonable fee.
So this lets-all-get-experience project may well get done with PHP, PostgreSQL, and FreeBSD. And when we're done we'll have experience with a bunch of non-Microsoft tools, and we may have a different answer for clients who want scaleable applications but can't (or don't want to) pay Microsoft's fees.
Despite the propaganda, Microsoft didn't win the PC wars by skullduggery or deceit. They won by targetting the "influential end user" (their words) and providing lots of information. Software consultants are precisely the kind of people that Microsoft has depended upon, and we've been a very loyal Microsoft shop. We've benefitted enormously from the Microsoft Developer Network program, and we've steered a lot of clients to Microsoft-based solutions (and thus Microsoft operating systems) over the years. But Microsoft's pricing, and licensing, and upgrade policies have us--among the most loyal of Microsoft loyalists--actively questioning our relationship to them.
John Murdoch
Wind Gap Technology Group
Isn't that the final irony that the biggest wealthiest and some would say most sophisticated companies will be the biggest consumers of NT-2K-XP while everyone else just gets by with fast good reliable stable safe open source. Fortune 500 firms will be able to afford all the convolutions of Windows code and will smugly assume that they're getting the best bang for the buck. They're not that sensitive to support costs so they'll be fat dumb and happy. Smaller firms, nonprofits and the like will use anything but Windows code.
But the biggest irony of all will be that MS will finally be an enterprise provider not because their stuff is any good but because large companies can afford it.
Microsoft haters still have something to worry about. The company operates with a 40% profit margin. Only the mob and the phone company can get away with that kind of margin.
What this means is that Microsoft could substantially reduce all their prices and still make a reasonable margin - one comparable to other companies like AOL whose margin is 1%.
All Microsoft really needs to do as free competition arises is reduce price structure enough to keep the free solutions out because it costs to much to switch. This cost of re-tooling will ring true with CTOs, and they will be quite happy to keep paying what they've been paying.
However, Microsoft wants it all. The new licensing strategy with XP intends to increase company gross by 60% over the next 5 years or so. Or kill it, one of the two. But a monster with 30 BILLION dollars hard cash in the bank is pretty hard to kill. They can come back failure after failure if necessary, and still buy all their competitors.
As to the credibility of the story, I find it entirely believable. One of the large issues is that the story compares fairly incompetent NT engineers with competent linux ones. Even so, server administration requires much less admin time on linux - we estimate it is a 3 to 1 difference.
Please tell me that you mean that in the context of the article -- that MS would have been better in this case, if only the licensing were better. I could belive that. But if you mean to imply that MS is substantially better across the board, that's just absurd. I am doing things with PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Linux that NT and 2000 just can't do. Not "MS is a little weaker" but MS doesn't even offer it. For example, PHP shared sessions on a server farm -- MS says "wait until ASP.net!" And working with mod_rewrite for on-the-fly, behind-the-scenes rewriting of URLs (NOT the same as a redirect). And for that matter, the server farm itself -- with Linux and LVS, I put together an easy 3 box farm for $15,000, and it's faster than the $50,000 machine it replaced. That's superior technology.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
So, NT is better because you can get free support from Microsoft, and thus there's no increased TCO? Please enlighten all of the other readers here; I'm sure we'd all like to get free support for Windows.
Of course official Linux support costs money; official NT support costs money too. Your TCO will rise in either case. The quality and availability of unofficial (user-provided) Linux support is higher (in most people's estimation, at least) than unofficial Windows support.
I'm not sure what the point of having a number of support organizations is; do you always prefer to pay again for second and third opinions? As long as you can get one provider to give you support, what's the problem? I find it hard to believe that SuSe won't sell you 24-hour phone support in the Netherlands. I suppose with more support organizations available, competition will drive the price down somewhat, but on the other hand do you really wish to purchase support from the bargain basement?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Agreed. The entire problem that the company in the article faced was NOT caused by their software selection or their NOS. It was caused because they did not employ an internal DIT-styled position or internal technical consultant. They have nobody in that company to explain the situation from a 3rd-person perspective. Its just a bunch of execs listening to MS FUD on one side and RedHat FUD on the other side.
Won't go with AD because the PDC/BDC model wasn't effective? Yah, that makes a ton of since... MS isn't actually trying to IMPROVE their scalability. They just want you to buy into a new technology. Bah, those stingy execs need to get a clue and hire some more knowledgable (and costly) IT people. The tiny increase in salary will get them a tremendous boost in productivity and save them a ton of money in the long run.
Eventually, RedHat will screw them over and they'll move on to another outsourced consulting company.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah